The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

  Gabe sat at the kitchen table, stroking Chester’s head to calm him; the dog had become overexcited on their return and was still trembling.

  ‘It was more than sixty years ago,’ Gabe told Eve, exasperated. ‘Those poor kids’ve been long gone.’

  She came back at him. ‘Time has nothing to do with it. Look, even Chester’s nervous of this place.’

  ‘He’s not used to it yet.’

  Eve ignored him. ‘It’s as if the house has a memory. I can feel it.’

  ‘You’re talking crazy.’ Gabe’s voice was low and even, but he was becoming impatient. ‘You’re saying the place is haunted, there’s ghosts running around? Sure the house is spooky, but there are no ghosts, no such thing.’

  ‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts. But somehow some places are forever marked by their own history. Remember the first time I took you to the Tower of London, how you actually shuddered when we went into the Bloody Tower? You told me it was because you could feel its brutal past, as if the memory of murders and executions still lingered.’

  ‘Ah, c’mon, Eve . . .’

  She turned away from him to make the coffee.

  ‘I can sense something bad about Crickley Hall,’ she tried to explain, her back towards Gabe.

  ‘It’s in your imagination.’

  ‘Those children died in this house. They all died in the flood.’

  It was a terrible story, a deeply tragic one, relayed to them by the vicar himself, his wife frowning all the way through the telling of it.

  During the Second World War, when the German Luftwaffe was constantly bombing London and other English cities, many young children were evacuated without their mothers – most of the menfolk were overseas fighting for their country – to safer havens in countryside towns and villages. Eleven boys and girls had been sent to Hollow Bay for the duration from a south London orphanage. They came to live in Crickley Hall, which, because it was empty, had been appropriated by the Ministry of Health with the consent of the owner at that time who rarely used it as his personal residence anyway. There they would be cared for and resume their education.

  On the night of the Great Storm, as the vicar had called the 1943 flood, and after the high moors had, sponge-like, absorbed six weeks of continuous rainfall so that they could accept no more, they had disgorged their load into the already rising local rivers and streams around them. The Bay River was a natural conduit more or less straight down to the sea.

  Debris and fallen trees had been blocked by the bridges along the river’s length, and when these finally gave way under the pressure, the floodwaters were disastrously released. Some houses on the riverbank were demolished, others badly damaged, as the floodwaters had poured down to devastate the harbour village. Although Crickley Hall, built so solidly, was left standing, all the evacuees and their guardian perished. Because the children were orphans, there were no relatives to mourn them, not even uncles and aunts, but the surviving villagers took them into their hearts and grieved for them along with their own lost. A special area of the church grounds that had never been used before became the burial plot for the children and the other members of the community who had died on that terrible night.

  When Gabe had asked Trevellick who maintained the children’s graves so caringly, he had received a surprise. It seemed it was Percy Judd, Crickley Hall’s own caretaker and gardener, who tended them, laying pretty wild flowers under each stone in October every year, the anniversary of the orphans’ deaths.

  At the time, Gabe refrained from asking the vicar about the neglected grave, the one that stood apart from the rest, overgrown with grass and weeds and left unkempt. It could be that Augustus Theophilus Cribben, who was buried there, was just a local who had died of natural causes (although the marker claimed he was only forty-two when he’d passed away) in the same year as the flood. Maybe he had been buried at the back of the cemetery because he wasn’t a popular figure among the locals and hadn’t anyone to mourn his passing.

  ‘Gabe, your coffee.’

  Eve was standing before him, a steaming mug in her hand.

  ‘Sorry, hon. I was thinking on something.’

  ‘About the house, Gabe. I don’t want to stay here.’ Her voice was soft, not nagging. She was sincere, genuinely troubled.

  ‘Eve, we’ve only been here one night and a day.’ He took the coffee from her and quickly put it down on the table. He blew at his fingers. ‘We gotta at least give it a chance to work out. The job’s important.’

  She leaned into him, a hand going to the back of his neck. ‘I’m sorry. I know it seems stupid, but can’t you sense it too? There’s . . . there’s a mood about Crickley Hall. Loren said she heard crying coming from the landing cupboard yesterday.’

  ‘She heard a sound like crying. Coulda been a trapped animal.’

  ‘But there was no animal inside when you looked.’

  ‘Mouse or, God help us, a rat. Maybe even a squirrel. Found its way out the way it got in.’

  ‘And the shadow she saw.’

  ‘Trick of the light. What else could it be? Whoever heard of a white shadow?’

  ‘What if it was a memory of someone, a person – a child – who died here in traumatic circumstances? The house has stood empty a long time, we’ve been told. Don’t you wonder why?’

  ‘Yeah, because it’s too big, it’s too cold, and it smells of damp. I just never realized it when I found the place in the summer. And you’re emotionally worn out, Eve.’

  She flinched at that, but said nothing, because she knew it was true. Gabe hadn’t made her confront it until now. Then: ‘Perhaps Loren saw a ghost.’

  ‘I was afraid you were gonna say that. Eve, Loren might believe in that kinda thing, but we’re adults – we should have more sense.’

  ‘Meaning I’m being irrational.’

  He didn’t want to start anything with her; her emotions were too fraught, she’d been hanging on the edge for too long now.

  ‘Crickley Hall isn’t haunted,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Isn’t it? How do you know?’

  ‘Like I said, there’s no such thing as ghosts.’

  ‘Gabe, a few years ago I wrote a piece on celebrities and models who used psychics and clairvoyants, people who wouldn’t make an important decision without first consulting their personal oracle. It was one of the psychics I interviewed who told me about houses that sometimes held on to memories, usually when something traumatic has happened in them. Like the Bloody Tower. The psychic told me this was often the cause of hauntings, images released into the atmosphere by the house itself.’

  ‘And I guess your psychic had a direct line to ghosts, huh?’

  ‘You can be cynical, Gabe, but three out of the five I interviewed were totally convincing.’

  ‘So the other two were frauds.’

  ‘Not necessarily. They explained to me that occasionally their powers let them down. It didn’t mean they were fakes.’

  Gabe suppressed a groan. ‘Look,’ he said patiently, ‘let’s give it two weeks and if you’re still uneasy I’ll find us somewhere else to rent. Deal?’

  She did not reply immediately and her fingers slid away from his neck down to his shoulder. ‘I don’t know . . .’ she said eventually.

  ‘Give it a try, Eve.’

  ‘Just two weeks?’

  ‘Guaranteed.’ His own hand slipped round her waist. ‘If you’re still unhappy living here by then, we move on.’

  Chester’s muzzle pushed into his lap. The dog whimpered as if displeased with the arrangement.

  12: SECOND NIGHT

  It was night and rain continued to hurl itself against the windows. Heavy clouds concealed a gibbous moon.

  Eve lay awake next to Gabe, listening to his gentle snoring, the soft sound reassuring rather than annoying. She would have turned and laid a hand over his hip, but she did not want to disturb him. Gabe was tired; he’d worked hard that morning and afternoon, finishing the unpacking with her, moving furniture so
that rooms suited them better, the only break being the trip down into the village. The walk back up the hill in the rain had been pretty tiring. The girls were fast asleep next door, having gone to bed much earlier than usual without complaint.

  It was well past midnight and she was restless, even though she, too, was worn out. She hated these nights when her mind would not allow her sleep; she knew she could take a Zopiclone, but she’d been taking the sleeping tablets for too many months now and she wanted to break the habit. But night thoughts tormented her. Haunted her.

  Gabe was ever patient, comforting her in her darkest moods, never himself weakening – at least, containing the heartache Eve knew he felt. But then Gabe had learned to repress his emotions at an early age. When she first met him, when he boldly marched up to her in a fashionable bar in Notting Hill Gate that Eve and her friends from the magazine used, he had seemed breezy, confident, sure of himself. Later, when they got to know each other – when they realized they had fallen in love; so fast, it had happened so fast! – he had revealed to her that he’d been scared witless when he had introduced himself that night, scared of rejection, scared that she would turn her back on him. (Gabe never had been aware of the stunning effect he had on most women. Sometimes in a certain light, or if his face was seen at a certain angle, he was beautiful – with cornflower-blue eyes, sandy hair that was neither blond nor brown, and a compact body that seemed always poised as if ready to pounce.) In those days he had a natural aggression that simmered just below a surface of cool. It came from his upbringing.

  He had been raised in the town of Galesburg, Illinois, and had never known his father, a salesman in pharmaceuticals apparently, who hadn’t stayed around when his girlfriend had fallen pregnant with Gabe. Jake was his name – that was one of the few things Gabe knew about the man other than his profession. Oh, and Jake was a gambler and a drinker and a scumbag who, Gabe’s mother often told her son, had a bitch in every town he visited.

  Irene Caleigh, Gabe’s mother, was a drinker too. She was also a cheap lay – by the age of eleven, Gabe had come to know the meaning of the word ‘lay’ – for men called on her at all hours of the night. Sometimes the man – ‘uncles’ she had told him to call them – and Irene would go out to local bars and return later to the ramshackle apartment that was Gabe’s home, but as often as not, the men friends would bring bottles of booze – ‘hooch’ Gabe called it – with them and the boy would be told to wait on the stairway with a warning not to go ‘roaming around’. The one bed he shared with his mother would be ‘occupied’ for the evening.

  Sometimes, when it grew late, Gabe would fall asleep on the stairs only to be woken by heavy feet stepping over him, ‘uncles’ on their way out. His mother would then come to fetch him, picking him up in her arms, cuddling him and planting wet, sour kisses on his cheeks. She seemed most loving then, most tender, and he would curl up contentedly against her back as they slept in the rumpled bed. This from the age of eight.

  By ten he was running wild with other, older, neighbourhood kids, stealing from stores, taking hubcaps from cars, vandalizing property, and more than once Irene was called down to the local cop station where they threatened to lock her boy up for a while if he persisted in his antisocial behaviour. That always frightened him, and Irene would belabour the warning on the way home. Yet Gabe could not remember his mother ever raising a hand to him; sure, she tongue-lashed him and made all kinds of threats in the days that followed, but not once did she strike him in anger or frustration. In later years, he thought it might have been her guilt that always stopped her, the guilt of being a poor single mother. Also, he believed, she truly loved him in her own inadequate way.

  When Gabe was just twelve years of age, Irene Caleigh died (cirrhosis of the liver, he reasoned years later, because one of the ‘uncles’ at the funeral bluntly told him, ‘She died of the drink, son’). Gabe had spent a month or so (he could never remember how long exactly) in a care home, until one day an aunt called Ruth, his mother’s older sister and who he hardly remembered (she hadn’t attended the funeral), came to collect him. Aunt Ruth took her nephew back to her old ramshackle but clean clapboard house on the outskirts of Quincy, where some areas were even rougher than those he had been used to.

  Aunt Ruth was kind to him, if somewhat distant, but the wildness was already in him, and he was soon loose in the streets, again joining a gang whose members were mostly older than himself. Cars were his obsession – other people’s cars, that is – and he soon learned to hot-wire them. In fact, his skill at breaking into vehicles and quickly getting them running without keys and no matter what model quickly earned him the respect of his elders in the gang – even then, he seemed to have an affinity with machinery of any kind. But when he was fourteen, Gabe’s increasing delinquency came to a sudden and tragic end.

  The pristine stolen Mercedes saloon in which Gabe and his friends were joyriding went out of control on a bend and crashed into three trees, one after the other. The driver, seventeen years old and gang leader, a tough guy who was good in a rumble, went through the windscreen when the car hit the first tree, to die instantly as his body slammed into the tree trunk, his bowed head snapping at the neck and smashing his own ribcage, while the passenger in the seat next to him broke his spine at the second tree and had his foot turned back to front on the third impact. Gabe and another gang member, who shared the rear seats with him, were thrown to the floor at the first impact, and there they stayed, bounced around but saved from serious injury by the backs of the front seats.

  Perhaps it was to deter him from a career of crime that the authorities decided to deal with Gabe firmly. For the auto-theft itself and because of its serious outcome, plus Gabe’s past record of minor offences, he was sent to the Illinois Institute for Delinquent Boys for one year, while his companion, who was even younger than Gabe and had a clean sheet as far as the law was concerned, was given a period of probation. The front-seat passenger, who had broken his back and lost a foot, was deemed punished enough.

  Because of Gabe’s ongoing problem with authority, he served a further three months at the facility. But something worked there. They found he had an aptitude for machinery as well as calculation and they encouraged him to pursue his gift. Because he did not want to serve any further time, those last three months of incarceration had more value than the first twelve months: Gabe knuckled down and began to study for a career as an engineer, a mechanical engineer. When he was released, he returned to Quincy and Aunt Ruth, went back to high school and attended night college to learn as much as he could about engineering. On weekends he worked as a junior mechanic in a garage and car showroom (which meant mainly washing cars and handing tools to real mechanics), watching everything they did to engines, learning fast while he did so. The meagre amount of cash he earned was handed over to Aunt Ruth to help pay towards his own keep.

  At seventeen, having achieved good results in both school and night college, he left Quincy for New York City. Unbeknown to him, his aunt had been secretly saving money for precisely this kind of move, which she knew would come sooner or later; she had even put aside the money he had given her from his weekend work. He had spent almost a year of hardship in the Big Apple, living in a one-room attic apartment in the South Bronx, taking any job that came his way – washing dishes in a Harlem bar, short-order cook in a diner, delivering pizzas, shelf-stacking and serving in an all-night Mini-Mart – mostly night-time labour so that he could hunt for work as an engineer during the day (on occasions, he had introduced himself to as many as five engineering companies during the course of one day). Eventually his persistence paid off: he got himself taken on as a junior trainee structural and mechanical engineer in a large, global corporation, APCU Engineering, and he had never looked back. At the age of twenty-one, Gabe had been sent across to England, and there he’d stayed ever since.

  And then, he and Eve had met. In that hip bar in pre-film Notting Hill. They had quickly married when she had become pregnant with
Loren and neither of them had regretted the union: she loved him now as much as ever – no, perhaps even more than in the early days; she had come to know so much about him – and she was sure Gabe felt exactly the same way about her. It was just that she was so . . . so distracted now, thought too much about their lost son. If only Cam would . . . would he come back? she asked herself. There was still a faint, almost elusive, hope in her that one day soon their son would be returned to them. As long as he remained on the missing list there was always that chance . . .

  A flurry of rain, driven by a vigorous wind, beat against the bedroom’s two windows, making her start. She craned her neck to look towards the sound as the windows rattled in their frames. The night outside was wild, unrelenting, and no friend to slumber. Eve faced the ceiling again, lonely because her partner slept. She tried to clear her mind of everything but, as ever, the misery crept back, staking its claim.

  Oh God, don’t let it be so, her mind pleaded as it had for almost a year. Missing doesn’t have to mean dead. Someone could have taken him for their own, some stranger could be loving him as we love him. Please, please send my innocent child back to me! In the daytime lately it had become easier to suppress the torment but in the darkness of night, when others slept and she felt so alone, the thoughts were almost impossible to control. Yet even the possibility that Cam might be dead seemed like a betrayal of her son.

  The wind suddenly died and the rain’s fury went with it. Now the rain pattered against the glass. Low clouds overhead must have parted, for moonlight entered the bedroom.

  Then a sound different from the steady soft drum of the rain. It was a tapping and it came from somewhere out on the landing.

  Eve listened, tried to determine its source. It was becoming louder, no longer a tapping but a muffled knocking.