Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

  The man was too cautious who let mere darkness come between him and the only one who could set things straight.

  *

  But for the candle’s wretched little flame I would have been sightless. The ladder’s rungs were worn very shiny which suggested someone’s frequent visits. At first I had little idea of where I was going among all the false chimneys, double entrances and network of catwalks to confuse the searchers. Such a priest-hole had probably been built into the oldest part of the Hall in the 1580’s when anyone brave or foolhardy enough to follow the Catholic faith had been forced to do so totally clandestinely.

  Whoever roamed the house could still climb down the hidden ladder to pass through false walls quite easily. I flexed my aching knees and stretched my arms out in the gloom when it became apparent that a second set of steps led higher.

  Nor was my progress entirely straightforward. Twice I had to prop my candle at the mouth of a trapdoor while I retraced my steps briefly to retrieve my gun. Again, that voice! The singer would intentionally and cruelly lead me on. Now I could not seek her out unrequited. The Devil take her! While I climbed I pricked up my ears at the promise of her call, stubbornly justified my shameless pursuit with false sightings of my own.

  At last I arrived in the draughty attics. I had to balance on a sagging wooden plank a few inches wide that stretched across the roof’s massive framework of worm-eaten rafters. This, too, had been the path of some errant priest’s desperate escape route.

  I snapped shut the breach on my gun.

  ‘Marigold, I know it’s you,’ I cried, while the rancid smell of something resembling birds’ droppings filled my nostrils.

  As I swung my candle higher I lit a rafter. There, crudely chiselled into the thick black beam were Roman letters: M, J, M, V, I. Such carvings were as old as the Hall’s original construction. The initials had been put there by the builders but were not those who built it. Rather, they stood for Maria, Jesu, Mater and Virgo Virgonum, they were a very old way of keeping evil out of the house.

  I started back through the ghastly gloom. The prowler of these dusty trusses knew them better than I did, the balance of advantage lay with them as they moved along beyond my view. I had no choice but to teeter blindly forwards on my toes, when once more I heard a song taunt me.

  Still I was disinclined to suspend all judgement, given, as I was, to trust the truth, facts and soundness of my own inferences. That my eyes deceived me I doubted, for the figure of a woman had to be more solid image than mirage, less phosphorescent flame or ignis fatuus than actual person by the light of my candle. For, while I stood almost totally immersed in a sea of blackness, I saw bright signals and flashes enter my peripheral vision. She detached herself in order to drift across my eye’s watery vitreous, wrenched free of my retina, somehow.

  When a blind man discovered that he could see again he should no longer have to play blind-man’s-buff, he should discern, comprehend and inquire sensibly about the one before his eyes. The white, shrouded figure that drifted towards me becoming brighter and brighter did not weigh anything, did not flex the plank beneath her feet as I did, but was driven by her own secret forces.

  Long raven locks billowed in a non-existent breeze around her fair shoulders while her arms stayed pinned to her sides just like a real ghost.

  I laughed. With downturned face she crossed space too instantaneously for me to anticipate. She carried no light and yet the hideous shadows around her lent her a semblance of shape. Dark was light and hot was cold. These seeming contradictions stimulated my own senses to make out her luminosity through diffused or reflected rays that remained undetected. In short, she would have me see the invisible.

  She had summoned me, evidently.

  No, I had summoned her.

  Yes, I had. And she had come.

  She raised her eyelids and through her mane of loosely folded hair I glimpsed the adorable, deep black pupils of a living creature. I saw on her lips a flash of colour. Blood flowed again through her cheeks and returned to her forehead. A slight smile showed and her burning eyes flickered momentarily in their sockets. Sternly they stared at me across an ill-defined gulf more out of pity than criticism. Which was when I realised that I was powerless to move or resist, I was defeated by my own sense of suspended mischief. Clearly she could not be dead, so what was she?

  *

  Although we were face to face the ‘ghost’ seemed to look at me from a great distance. With longing came doubt, I was afraid of my own ‘sleepwalking’. I wanted to say sorry for what I had done to her, but if she were back from the dead then why waste time on useless excuses? Foreboding was more like it. She stood before me as someone unprepared to diminish the magnitude of my offence any longer.

  At the moment the irradiant wraith raised her bony hands in grim salutation, she showed me the crimson hole where her heart should have been. Naturally, my delight at seeing her was balanced by a genuine pang of apprehension, I wanted to go down on my knees and pray for my own deliverance. When a man was so desirous of a woman’s grace, he should not shrink from meeting her in the strangest of places and oddest of circumstances.

  But she it was who spoke first.

  ‘Still you do not put me somewhere safe and sound, Colin?’

  ‘Such a place still proves elusive.’

  ‘Would you have me lost in this cold house for ever?’

  ‘Cannot I simply let you live on in my memory?’

  ‘That is neither one thing nor the other.’

  ‘Where else is there, then, to keep you?’

  ‘Whatever you decide, it must be our secret.’

  ‘And if I fail?’

  Suddenly there came into her look a tinge of suspicion. Those same lovely eyes began to ask why I was abandoning her? Her long white fingernails closed in a claw. Her accusing gaze laid renewed claim to our agreement: why did I not simply do what she wanted?

  No figment of fancy, it was on her lips I tried to plant some seal of atonement. With it, I attempted to squeeze her back to life. Because I aimed so hard to hold her, she had to let go of me. Because she let go of me I had to say sorry. Because I had to say sorry I broke the silence. Now there was nothing left to hold on to. Yet that tourniquet that was her bite upon my neck soon stopped the flow of blood through every artery. She was as ruthless as I had once been in the crushing of the jugular.

  Kissed myself, I failed to kiss. If she mocked me with her disgust and disappointment, the golden glint in her eyes revealed a caprice, a sudden and impulsive change of mood and behaviour, just when I was the one locked in her power. If the look in her eyes was consistently unrelenting it was because she wanted me to relive all those embraces I had once given so freely. She would have me join her in one last, great passion after the event, or else. She was resolved to confront me as if I alone could solve the riddle of her dead heart’s desire.

  With that needle-sharp caress came the taste and smell of something bitter, like rancid toothpaste. I had smelt it before, that stench from Hades, on her deathbed.

  Suddenly she reeled backwards. On my finger was the blue and gold enamelled ring that Jan had brought me from London. As soon as she saw it she let out a furious scream and tore it from me. For one moment she pondered the love token in her grasp. Then she gave a little laugh, only to appear unsure what to make of her own motives. While the ring gave her free course to give in to desire, feeling or impulse, she seemed less than satisfied with its return.

  Again I approached to show her some comfort, but her blank face refused to be comforted. She distrusted my divided loyalties, evidently. Rather, I stared into features that suddenly suffered a terrible marasmus. They started to waste away to the point where bone sucked flesh until it left hardly any substance. Soon her skin lacked all its bloodiest ingredients. A visage that turned so transparent and flimsy was quickly robbed of all expression, it could no longer stretch to laugh, smile or cry. Her eyes sank deep into their sockets.

  From her mouth erupted a
dark brown, soupy liquid that came all the way up from her stomach. Since her bowels were blocked by so much swelling the only way out was for all that awful sewage to pour back through her throat. It belched from her lips like a filthy fountain all over my face. It entered my mouth with one great retch. I could feel myself filling up with all the rotten, decaying sludge that smelt like dead rats from inside her festering body. Gone was the face of fond memory.

  Next moment, her skin turned ash-grey, then red, black and slimy green. Even as I choked and suffocated on her putrid entrails I was face to face with my own grief, guilt, cowardice, betrayal and lies.

  *

  Released from paralysis, I fell to my knees and groped about for my fallen gun which had somehow bridged the rafters. Incumbent on the catwalk, I felt my neck where teeth had held me rigid. That harsh, bloody bite had been brutal but not lethal. Instead, the brief, crude stoppage of my throat had meant that I could not cry out, but it was the uncertainty, not the trickle of blood, that had been such torture. It was not knowing whether each wheezing intake of breath was temporary or final that was so dreadful – it must have been how Lizzie had felt when I throttled her.

  With my gun in my grasp, I felt back in charge, fired both barrels.

  The recoil blew me sideways, even as the blast lit up the roof in a deafening double explosion. When a man chased the living but met the dead he did not expect them to respond to anything moral or emotional, he expected them to be repugnant. When they were repugnant they were incompatible with everything he had ever loved, they were of a world not his own. Since she was of another world there should not have been in her the slightest glimpse of anything human. Was she really all horror book vampire? Either way, she had a voice quite defiant:

  ‘Heare my crie. Anyone canne stoppe a woman’s life, but few her deathe, a thousande doors opene on to it.’

  *

  However much the prankster had got the better of me, they did not challenge my retreat along the narrow catwalk. Nor was I one to lose my reason. Any rotten, decaying smell stayed in my nostrils, not least because vomit stained my jacket where I had spewed up the contents of my own foul stomach. When a man was so bilious but had no illness he had to be suffering from the effects of himself only.

  My bare, ringless finger burned.

  In order to entice me closer someone needed the best bait they had. The easiest way to bait a man like me was to put a familiar face to his greatest moral and emotional dilemma. Just because I had set out to kill my wife didn’t mean that there couldn’t be love after death – someone fully intended to declare that, for me, it was not over.

  30

  ‘Never seen you look so drained,’ said Jan, dusting the pew before she sat down in her impossibly smart, grey cut twill trousers. ‘Never seen a man eat his heart out so. You look as white as a sheet.’

  Beyond the Lady Chapel’s pointed arches, the Parish Church of St John Baptist in Cirencester echoed to the noisy sound of a service being conducted in the nave, but I did my best to endure the distraction.

  ‘Never mind me,’ I snapped. ‘What about London? Did you, like, find our man?’

  ‘First, what’s all this about your latest fright? You really meet a prowler, Colin?’

  ‘It’s okay. I have a gun.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you’re not irritated or distressed by something. You look on tenterhooks.’

  From the south wall the Devil smirked at me while he shovelled screaming men and women into fire.

  ‘Honestly, I’m quite all right. I still can’t sleep for nightmares, that’s all.’

  Jan unfastened the mother-of-pearl buttons on her black, fingerless cashmere gloves. Then she rucked down each long cuff for extra warmth one by one. She did it in a way that truly meant business.

  ‘Maria has thought long and hard about your visions. Any doctor will tell you that such terrors only live in the unconscious, Colin. They might affect our behaviour and emotions when we dream but otherwise they remain as inaccessible as our own souls.’

  ‘I’ve begun to see this world afresh. Believe me, it’s full of ghosts and monsters.’

  Jan patted my hand reassuringly.

  ‘Maria says that none of it exists beyond the mind’s eye.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t doubt it. But that was before.’

  ‘Before what, Colin?’

  ‘Not everything stays in the head, some things get to break free. I’ve felt it ever since coming to Coberley Hall. Something unrestrainable, from within me.’

  ‘Must I say it again? You need to come back to London.’

  There arose a bitter impatience. I acknowledged the common sense of her advice, but not the sense advised.

  ‘Don’t you see? In Countess Lucy’s time the Civil War changed everything. Everyone was deemed to be on one side or the other: God’s or the Devil’s. There was no military or spiritual middle ground, especially for women. If you spoke your mind or did as you pleased you could just as easily be cast as a witch or an angel. Imagine what it felt like to lose a battle as well as your fortune. All over England, grief-stricken families were subjected to heavy fines and confiscation of their houses and land.’

  ‘You mean Coberley Hall became a microcosm of a national tragedy?’

  ‘When 250,000 men, women and children died of wounds, hunger and disease, each death had to be a personal tragedy but, yes, you could see a house like hers as the epitome of loss at a time when looters, rapists and killers roamed England for years.’

  Jan raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Er, how is it that this countess seems so alive to you suddenly, Colin?’

  ‘Do you good to listen.’

  I should have told her about what happened in the attics, but I didn’t.

  ‘Listen to me, Colin. There are no ghosts beyond the ones you create yourself. That goes for any other creatures, too.’

  ‘Have I not described him to you in every hideous detail?’

  ‘Doesn’t mean you met a dead soldier.’

  ‘That’s just one of his manifestations.’

  ‘You talking about something from folklore, Colin? Because I did some research. And, yeah, the word ‘bogle’ is very old. See here, it says it can mean a phantom, scarecrow or simply devil.’

  Leaning one hand heavily on the pew, I peered over Jan’s shoulder and saw words appear on her phone that were so small and alien as to be almost unintelligible.

  My eyes had not been too good lately.

  ‘‘Bogle’ is just one word for it.’

  ‘Actually it says here that the word goes right back to 1500 and beyond. There was a Middle English word ‘bugge’ which meant bugbear, but origins are obscure.’

  ‘Stop right there. Please. Yeah, please do.’

  ‘Sit still, Colin. It seems to me that you have literally been made to conjure some shape-shifter from the oldest, most primitive parts of your subconscious brain, a part we all still have buried under layers and layers of apparent sophistication. You’ve drawn something out of the darkness and given it life through your own fancy or conscience.’

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you about to call me a liar?’

  I distrusted her objectionable sensibleness.

  Jan’s jaw dropped. Then curiosity again got the better of her. She rested her phone in a fold of her cape where she dabbed her finger frantically on the touchscreen. Looking sideways over her fake fur collar, she shot me a look of totally uncomplimentary pity.

  ‘Since Lizzie’s death, have you not come to see yourself as a bit of a bogy man, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I feel like Lady Lucy does.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Rejected by my fellow men? Abandoned by God? Driven by demons? Nowadays we hardly have the vocabulary to express such things, but in her time everyone knew perfectly well what it is to be damned. She, alone, understands my predicament. She lived in an age when men behaved like beasts, too. I am…as one with her.’

  I jumped up to wal
k about with such decisiveness as was still available to me.

  Jan tried to take my hand.

  ‘I don’t know what else I can do to get you to calm down. Please lower your voice, Colin. You’re acting quite wildly. Will you not admit that you haven’t been right since you banged your head in that car accident? Doesn’t mean you’re haunted. Forget this Lady Lucy. Forget the Wild Man. They don’t belong in our world.’

  I clasped my head and my eyes were hardly able to focus.

  ‘And if he haunts her, too?’

  ‘Or there’s something of a civil war going on in us all?’

  ‘Really? That’s what you think?’

  ‘Yes, Colin, I do. Quite simply, there lurks in our psyche a prehistoric memory. Stuff of myth and legend, no less. Migrating tribes probably met real monsters millions of years ago during the Ice Age when they roamed Europe. Even today some people in remote places purport to see what you do in Coberley. In America they call it Big Foot but in Bhutan it is called Migou, in Tibet it is called Chemo. In Nepal they call it the Yeti.’

  ‘That is just people putting flesh on their fears.’

  ‘Sherpas call theirs an animal of God.’

  ‘Okay, yeah, I don’t think so. This bogle spoke to me.’

  ‘It says here that the Neanderthal genome was only sequenced in 2010. Many of us contain Neanderthal DNA – up to two or even four per cent. Even today we do battle with a very old part of ourselves.’

  I folded my arms, said nothing. Meanwhile Jan regaled me with some more of her ridiculous theories.

  ‘Another possibility is that the word ‘bogle’ is a corruption of the old word ‘bog’.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘‘Bog’ means ‘from the north’.’

  I wrung my hands. Next thing, Jan would have had the Abominable Snowman sit down between us. But she was not all wrong. If, over thousands of years we had forgotten the real monster we had not forgotten the fear. If we still had the fear we still had the instinct. If we all had the instinct we had the unconscious skill to see irrational things without conscious design. If we could still see things without being conscious we might be able to recall what our forbears saw in the darkest corners of our eyes.