A Spookies Compendium

by David Robinson

  “Look, Pete,” Kevin urged, “beggars can’t be choosers. Have you got three, four grand to spare? No. In that case we’re down to hiring from Bent Benny, like it or don’t. And trust me, I’ll be able to make enough money to pay Benny for the hire.” Kevin stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.

  “How?” asked Pete.

  Kevin glared. “I asked you to trust me.” Turning to Sceptre for support, he said, “Benny is an electronics genius. He’ll have everything we need and I won’t have to explain it in words of one syllable.” Returning to his list, he ran through it with his pen. Looking to Sceptre, he asked, “How many cameras? Three? Four?”

  “As many as we can afford,” said Sceptre.

  “Go for four and we can use mine too, which makes five. We’ll need an eight meg modem at least or the stuff will take ages to download. Whose phone will we be using?”

  Pete and Sceptre exchanged a glance that was almost telepathic, each telling the other that Kevin had not understood their intentions and someone would have to break it to him gently.

  “Phone?” asked Pete.

  “Yeah. You know. It’s that thing you make phone calls with.” Taking in their puzzled stares, Kevin flicked the ash from his cigarette roughly in the direction of the fireplace and missed, spreading it across the threadbare carpet. “Look, if you wanna drive these things from the computer here, you need a fast Internet connection. Half a meg, even a meg, is too slow considering the speed we may need to react. To run it, we have to hook up a phone connection and leave it open while the gear is running. Geddit? That lets the cell phone out. Lose the satellite and you break the connection, leaving you up the creek. For me it has to be the landline …”

  His voluble flow dried up as he realised they had turned first puzzled and then sympathetic eyes on him. Nervously he flicked the ash from his cigarette again.

  Sceptre reached across and took his other hand, squeezing it gently, a gesture of support and encouragement. Her smile was the sort one usually reserves for someone lost in an alien environment, or someone in deep shock. Kevin’s suddenly worried face said he was wondering which he would be when she made the announcement she was obviously going to make.

  In a low, soft and infinitely compassionate voice, Sceptre said, “Kevin, we can’t do this from here. We’ll be spending the night at Melmerby Manor.”

  Kevin withdrew his hand from hers, took a jumpy swallow of tea, crushed out his cigarette in his saucer and promptly lit another. “Spend the night at Melmerby Manor?” he squealed. His eyes were wide, his mouth half open as if he had just faced his worst nightmare.

  “What did you think we’d do?” asked Pete. “Wait here for the spooks to email us? Hope they’d text us to say they were up and about?”

  Kevin’s malleable features shifted rapidly. His chin jutting forward, eyes narrowing, he said, “I was just telling you what I thought we were going to do: run it all from here.”

  “We need to be there in case something goes wrong with the equipment,” Sceptre pointed out. “We need to be there when things happen so we can get to the actual location within the house.”

  “But the place is haunted.” Kevin had shifted position again, almost pleading with her.

  “If it were not,” Sceptre said, “we wouldn’t be interested in it. I have to follow up on this poor soul from the house last night, and he has gone to Melmerby Manor, therefore I have to be there.”

  “Well, you’ll be there on your own.”

  Sceptre tried to encourage him. “You’ve seen how they do it on those ghost hunting programs; they don’t work remote, do they?”

  “That’s TV,” Kevin complained. “You’re talking real life.”

  “Kevin, the spirits will not hurt you … well, most of them won’t.”

  Sceptre’s admission did nothing to lift Kevin’s flagging courage. “You mean there are those that will.”

  Sceptre hedged. She needed to bolster Kevin’s confidence, but she did not want to tell him outright lies. After thinking about it for a moment, she said, “There are those spirits who get angry when they realise their lives have been taken. Their anger can manifest itself in the physical movement of objects, but if they were to hurt you, it would probably be accidental.”

  “Well that’s a comfort, I must say,” Kevin snorted. “They kick me down the stairs, break my neck but it’s no problem because they didn’t mean to do it.”

  Across the table, Pete grinned. “Don’t be such a soft tart, Kev. Look, I don’t understand why we’re going, either. Sceptre says her spooky butler has told her to go there because the burglars who scared Angie Bilks last night are out there …”

  “They were not burglars, they were disturbed spirits.”

  Pete pressed on, ignoring Sceptre’s interruption. “To me that’s so much bull, but hey, it’s a way of passing the time.”

  Kevin was not persuaded. He played with his cigarette and his eyes darted left and right, taking in his flat mates by turn. “And suppose there really are ghosts?”

  “Oh, there are,” Sceptre assured him.

  Pete scowled at her. “Kevin, there’s no such things as ghosts.”

  Leaning on the table, Kevin took a deep drag on his cigarette and aimed his left index finger towards the computer station where the digital camcorder he had used during the night sat dormant, its battery on charge. “My footage last night says you’re wrong. I filmed that message on the wall as it happened.”

  Pete dismissed the observation with an airy wave of the hand. “You mean you think you did.”

  Angrily, Kevin got to his feet, strode to the workstation and picked up the camcorder, unplugged it and returned to the table. He set it on ‘play’ and rewound the footage, searching for the particular frames. As he did so, his brow furrowed.

  “That’s funny. It’s not there.”

  Sceptre looked sharply at him. “What’s not there?”

  Kevin passed over the camera and allowed her to run the frames. “The message on the wall, written across the Arsenal banner. It’s not there now, yet I know I filmed it. I was running the camera when it appeared.”

  He passed the camera across and allowed Sceptre to watch it. As she did, she, too, frowned. “That’s impossible. We both saw it. You did too, Pete.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what I saw. Besides, I was in the kitchen for a while. I have to go see Bilko this afternoon, so I’ll check to see if it’s still there.”

  While Sceptre rewound the recording and watched it again and again, her puzzlement increasing with each viewing, Kevin raised an eyebrow at Pete. “You want to know about Mind Games III?”

  Pete nodded. “I want to know where he got his hands on one of Jimmy Tate’s jiffy DVDs.”

  Kevin checked the time. “I’ll have to get a move on, too. I’ve a deal going down.”

  Pete shot him a glance. “Deal?”

  Kevin rose to the challenge. “Yes, a deal. Where do you think we’ll get the money for all this gear?” He took in Pete’s determined and disapproving frown. “I said, didn’t I? Trust me.”

  “The day I trust you, Keeley,” said Pete, “is the day I start believing in fairies … or Fishwick.”

  Sceptre passed the camera back to Kevin. “Don’t be too long, either of you,” she ordered, putting an end to their disagreement. “Sunset is just after four, it’s properly dark by five. I’d like to be out at Melmerby Manor and set up before dark.”

  Kevin grumbled, “We’re back to that, are we?”

  “Oh shut up moaning,” Pete chuckled. “I’ll be back in plenty of time, Sceptre, and if his deal is that simple, it won’t take him long.”

  “If you’re gonna make me spend the night at Melmerby Manor, my deal could take all night,” he muttered.

  Pete sighed. “Sceptre, why don’t you tell us about Melmerby Manor and calm Sir Coward de Custard’s nerves?”

  “No problem.” Sceptre gulped down her tea and stood up. “When I was at university, I did a piece on
the Melmerbys, and since then, I’ve done considerable research on the hauntings. I’ll just get my folder.”

  She scurried across to the bedrooms. Kevin watched her leave, then turned on Pete. “What are you playing at?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts,” Kevin reminded him. “How come you’re falling for this?”

  Pete toyed with his empty cup and turned a benign smile on his oldest friend. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but when she first moved in and told you all this guff about her spooky butler and psychic powers, weren’t you the one who said you might be able to sell the ghost hunting idea to a cable TV channel?”

  “Well, yes, but …”

  “How do you propose to sell it to the cable channels if you don’t have any footage to show them?” Pete cut in.

  “I know, but I thought …”

  Pete cut in again. “And despite what you may think of them, the bods who work for cable TV are professionals. You fake it and they’ll spot it in seconds. You need genuine footage, mate, and the only way you’ll get it is to spend the night in a place like Melmerby Manor.”

  “I know all this,” Kevin objected, relieved at last to get a full sentence out without being interrupted, “but I asked why you were going along, not me.”

  “Because I’ve nothing better to do,” Pete confessed. “This time of year is quiet for private eyes. There won’t be much bad debt work till after the New Year, and there won’t be many divorces until February, after the party season is over. I don’t fancy working security in the shopping mall, so I might as well tag along with you two.”

  Kevin drew deeply on his cigarette. “You mean you’re trying to get into her pants.”

  Pete grinned. “Well, you never know your luck in a big city.” He made an effort to encourage his best friend. “Come on, Kev, it’ll be a lark. And no ghost worth its salt would hassle me or he’d get my boot in his proverbials. And you never know, get this right and the paranormal investigations could be a paying game, even if all you ever do is provide rational explanations for this stuff.”

  “On telly, you mean?” Kevin’s eyes brightened in hope.

  Pete dashed his wish. “TV isn’t the only medium, you know. I was thinking more of explaining this stuff to those bods who claim they’ve got spooks in the cellar.”

  Kevin gave a non-committal grunt, crushed out his cigarette and got to his feet. Behind him, on a corner cabinet close to the settee arm, sat a CD player and a rack of discs. Kevin selected an Abba album, powered up the player and dropped the CD in.

  Carrying a loose-leaf folder, Sceptre returned from the bedrooms as Dancing Queen began to play softly. “Abba?” she asked. “Why is it always Abba?”

  Pete smiled. “The 70s are back. Anyway, Kev has a thing about the blonde.”

  The remark put Kevin on the defensive again. “So do most blokes.”

  Pete snorted. “As if a tasty bit of totty like Agnetha would look twice at a fat, windy git like him.”

  “Pete, that’s very insulting,” Sceptre scolded.

  Kevin smiled gratefully. “Thank you, Sceptre.”

  “Agnetha is not a tasty bit of totty.”

  Kevin pulled his tongue out at her.

  Seating herself at the table, Sceptre opened the folder and spent a few moments studying her neat handwriting before she spoke. “I want you to understand that this,” she tapped her papers, “is not a definitive history. Even with my family contacts, I was not given access to many private papers which would confirm or deny a lot of what I’m going to tell you.”

  Pete looked down his nose. “You mean these snooty sods didn’t want skeletons coming out of the closet.”

  Kevin looked alarmed. “Skeletons? Are there skeletons? Tell me there aren’t any skeletons,” he implored.

  “It’s a metaphor, Kevin.” She sighed. “Stop being such a dunderhead.” She concentrated on Pete. “Old families like my own and the Melmerbys have much to answer for, Pete, but they are nevertheless very protective of their names.” She gestured at Pete’s newspaper, its headlines blazing with the latest scoop of a politician caught in a compromising position. “With today’s media, you can hardly blame them.”

  Pete shrugged. “All right. Go on.”

  Sceptre cleared her throat. “In 1612,” she began, “Donald Devis arrived in Ashdale and was taken on as a shepherd by the Melmerbys. He was the son of a woman hanged as one of the Lancashire Witches in 1609. Donald had a daughter, Aggie, and in 1648 she, too, was accused of witchcraft and hanged from an ash tree within the grounds of Melmerby Manor.”

  “And what kind of evidence did they bring against her?” asked Pete.

  Kevin tutted. “Typical copper. Always looking for incidentals like evidence. Can’t you take anything on trust, Pete?”

  Sceptre ignored him and answered Pete with a casual air. “The usual kind; a ewe she was tending gave birth to a deformed lamb; the local farmhands were all bewitched by her beauty. At her trial, they confessed to having been forced into having sex with her, which meant they, too, were guilty, and as a result, they had their souls cleansed. It was the custom.”

  “Had their souls cleansed. How was that done?” Pete wanted to know. “Flogging? The stocks? Drowning them in a pool of holy water?”

  “They were hanged.”

  Pete was appalled at the matter-of-fact simplicity with which Sceptre delivered the announcement. “They were executed after she dropped her drawers and said, ‘come and get it’?”

  “It was the way they dealt with bewitched men,” Sceptre explained.

  Kevin chuckled. “So, go on, Sceptre. You’ve strung up Aunt Aggie and Desperate Donald’s shepherds, what happened then?”

  “Shortly after her execution, it was said that the area was being haunted by her ghost. Sir Henry Melmerby, the man who had her hanged, was killed four years later when his horse reared on the moors and threw him into a peat bog. He hit his head on something, blacked out and drowned, and when they dug him out, they found that his head had struck Aggie’s skull. Having been condemned as a witch, she had been buried in non-consecrated ground on the moors.”

  Kevin lit another cigarette. His hands had begun to tremble at the preceding account. “And his horse chucked him at exactly that spot.”

  Sceptre lowered her voice to a hushed whisper. “It was said that the horse was spooked by the ghost of Aggie Devis.”

  “I’ll bet they hanged the horse,” complained Pete.

  Sceptre stared icily at him. “No, they did not hang the horse.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “They shot it.” Sceptre took in their gaping faces but pushed on in defence of the 17th century way of life. “Those were tough times, you know. Life was hard and cruel and there were hundreds of crimes for which a man could be hanged.”

  “Or a horse could be shot,” snorted Pete. “They were barbarians.”

  “They were simple and superstitious people, Pete,” said Sceptre. “We live in a more enlightened age.”

  “Oh, of course.” Pete’s voice oozed sarcasm. “I mean if you think about it, we pick on people for much more important reasons, don’t we? Skin colour, religion, even the football team they support.”

  “Yes,” agreed his chubby chum, “and I’ll bet those Arsenal supporters will never forget the day you picked on them.” He smiled at Sceptre. “Four of them spotted his Manchester United shirt and started giving him verbal.”

  Sceptre almost dare not ask. “Pete beat them up?”

  “Put it this way, by the time Pete had done with them, two of them were auditioning for soprano choirs and the other two had decided that watching snooker was safer than watching football.” Kevin laughed at the memory.

  She frowned her disapproval. “Violence is the last resort of the feeble-minded.”

  “No,” Pete disagreed. “Violence is the last resort of the Man U supporter faced with four Arsenal supporters looking for aggro.”

  “Can we
just stick to Melmerby Manor?” She shook her head. “Get you two on about Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United and we’ll never get anything done.” She paused a moment to gather her thoughts, while across the table, her two partners looked suitably contrite. “Over the years, Melmerby Manor has been rebuilt and had bits added onto it, and there have been numerous sightings of several ghosts, but two of them appear more often than the others. One is the apparition of a woman drifting along the upper landings as if she’s seeking something. The sound of a woman crying has also been heard on that landing. Most commentators believe it to be the ghost of Aggie Devis.”

  “Do we know what she’s looking for?” asked Kevin.

  “A short, fat, windy-arsed git from Ashdale,” grinned Pete.

  Kevin rounded on him. “Shut it, you.” To Sceptre, he invited, “Go on.”

  “No one knows,” she said, “but there is a theory. Aggie was born at Melmerby Manor in 1624, and had lived a happy life there. No one knows for sure, but it’s believed that she was, er, intact.” Sceptre blushed and Kevin screwed up his face in puzzlement.

  “What, you mean she had all her arms and legs and stuff?” he asked.

  “She was a virgin, you idiot,” said Pete.

  Sceptre blushed again. “Thank you, Pete. I was trying to avoid using that word. Anyway, Aggie was a vir… what she was, and the story goes that Sir Henry raped her. If you think about that situation, the house where she had been so happy for her whole life would become like a prison: a place of great torment. It could be, then, that Aggie’s spirit is seeking a way out of the house, a way out of the area. You see?”

  Kevin nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

  “Sounds like so much drivel to me,” said Pete.

  Kevin waved a dismissive hand at him. “Sceptre, you said there were two spooks at the manor.”

  She nodded. “The other is supposed to be the apparition of Squire Henry Melmerby, the man who hanged her. He has a habit of throwing things at people in the house. Cups, plates, knives, forks, that kind of thing.”

  “Knives and forks?” Kevin’s terror showed through again. “And has anyone been hurt by them?”