The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

  When they had first met, she had been a staff fashion writer for a magazine called Plenty, organizing fashion shoots, auditioning and hiring models, choosing photographers, finding suitable locations for background interest, liaising with PR companies, reporting on the main fashion shows in the UK and Europe, interviewing celebrities to discover whose labels they were currently wearing.

  She and Gabe were only married six months before Loren came along and Eve went freelance. Her contacts and her reputation were good and before long she was doing work for a number of magazines – Marie Claire, Vogue, Elle, among others – and was able to concentrate on writing purely about fashion without the baggage that went with it. But when Cameron was born, and then Catherine (Cally) a year later, Eve put her career on hold for a while so that she could devote more time to her family.

  By then, they were living in a largish Victorian property in Canonbury, north London, and Gabe’s salary was high enough to cover most of their needs. She still accepted the more interesting assignments, however, and when she did she would put her best efforts into them, which was why her very last freelance job – covering London’s Fashion Week – had left her so exhausted. And that exhaustion had led her to falling asleep for a few minutes in the park where Cameron had gone missing . . .

  Eve was wrong to blame herself, but how could he convince her? He pushed the thoughts away as he spooned coffee granules into a mug, then poured boiling water over them. There had been too much brooding for way too long. If only for Loren and Cally’s sake, Eve had to snap out of it. But how could he help her?

  Although Cam was a real boy’s boy, a son that a father could really enjoy, Eve seemed to have a special ‘connection’ with him. No, he wasn’t a momma’s boy, but there was an affinity between them. They even shared the same trivial abnormality: the little finger of Cam’s right hand was shorter than the one on his left, the same as Eve’s; they also both had fingerprint whorls on the fleshy mount of their right palm. It was a similarity that they enjoyed, for it wasn’t an obvious deformity – hands had to be compared to notice it.

  Looking out the window, Gabe saw that the rain had stopped, although only temporarily judging by the ominous clouds that cruised the sky. As he watched, the sun broke out from behind one of those clouds and the lawn glistened with raindrops caught in the grass. The sudden brightness and the green denseness of the grass and foliage lifted some of the heaviness of spirit from him. Whatever the shortcomings of Crickley Hall itself, it couldn’t be denied that it was in a beautiful location. From where he stood in the kitchen he could see past the old oak from which the swing dangled to the rushing waters of the Bay River, fallen leaves and small broken branches swept along with its hurried journey down to the Bristol Channel. He watched as a heron landed on the opposite bank close to the wooden bridge; the heavy bird must have decided that this was a poor place to catch passing fish, for its great wings soon flapped and it took off again in an impossibly lumbering rise into the air.

  Gabe felt the need for fresh air himself and he carried his mug of coffee into the main hall where he unlocked the big front door to let the breeze, such as it was, circulate and disperse some of the musty odour that permeated the house. He stood on the doorstep and sipped the coffee as grey wagtails, with their black bibs, wheeled and dived over the garden, catching insects and celebrating the rare sunshine.

  His thoughts returned to Eve, how she had changed, how she was before that fateful day. She was still beautiful to him – slim, small-breasted, long-legged, with deep-brown eyes that matched her deep-brown hair – but now there were lines on her face that had only appeared during the last few months, and there was a darkness round her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and sadness of soul. Her hair, once worn so long that its ends cascaded over her shoulders, was now cut short, urchin-style, not because of fashion but because it was easier to manage, nothing to bother over. A psychologist might suggest it was shorn as self-punishment, arising from guilt.

  She used to have a sly humour, a sharp wit, but now Eve was subdued, her thoughts – and her feelings – distracted by the loss. To see her this way added to Gabe’s own grief, but there was nothing he could do that he hadn’t already tried to ease her despair. Even harsh, desperate words, tough love they called it, had failed to draw any positive response because she fully accepted her own condition and refused to be stung by his criticism. Ultimately, he could only love her, not in an indulgent way, but in a way that let her know that he cast no blame on her.

  Gabe drew in a deep breath of fresh moist air. A little sunshine made a difference, he thought. It helped cheer the soul. If only the rain—

  His legs almost buckled as Chester brushed by him. The dog scooted across the lawn, past the swing that stirred lazily in the breeze.

  Goddamnit! He’d forgotten about the mutt, hadn’t closed the kitchen door behind him. Chester had seen his chance for freedom and had taken it. Like a bat out of hell, he streaked towards the bridge.

  ‘Chester! Get back here!’

  The dog hesitated at the bridge, turned briefly to look back at his master, then scooted across it without stopping on the other side. Gabe stepped out of the doorway, coffee in hand, and stared open-mouthed.

  ‘Chester!’ he tried again. Exasperated, he put the coffee mug on the doorstep, then took off after the runaway. Gabe ran across the bridge, continuing to call the dog’s name, but knowing that by the determined way Chester had bolted up the hill he would stop for no one. Gabe stood in the middle of the lane, hoping to see some sign of the dog, but Chester was nowhere in sight.

  Gabe called out once more, this time through cupped hands, but it was futile: Chester had vanished.

  A shout from behind had Gabe swinging round.

  ‘Daddy!’

  Eve and the girls were walking up the hill towards him from the direction of the church.

  ‘What is it, Gabe?’ Eve asked as they drew nearer.

  ‘It’s that goddamn mongrel.’ Gabe shook his head in frustration. ‘He’s hit the road.’

  ‘Daddy.’ It was a moan from both girls.

  ‘It’s okay. We’ll find him. He can’t have gone far.’

  Cally’s face was already screwed up, ready for tears.

  ‘How did he get out?’ Eve was a little breathless from the steady climb up the hill.

  ‘Aah, I had the front door open and he hightailed it.’ Gabe shook his head once again, angry at himself. ‘Goddamnit.’

  Loren’s face was full of concern. ‘We haven’t lost him, have we, Dad?’

  ‘No, honey. We’ll find him.’ To Eve he said: ‘I’ll take a walk along the road. If I keep calling him, he might just be obedient for once and come back.’

  ‘I’ll go with you, Dad,’ Loren said immediately.

  ‘Me too, me too.’ Cally raced to him and pulled at his arm.

  Gabe leaned down to her. ‘You go with your ma, Sparky. We’ll find him quicker if it’s just me and Loren.’ He had chosen his words carefully, leaving no doubt that they would find the wayward pet. He kissed her plump cheek, tasting her tear trail that already stained it.

  Eve wasn’t convinced. ‘Oh Gabe, we haven’t lost him, have we? You will get him back . . .?’

  ‘We’ll find him, he can’t have gone far.’ Gabe hoped she would believe him.

  15: THE DREAM

  In Crickley Hall’s high-ceilinged sitting room off the great hall, there was a lumpy but comfortable couch and it was on this that Eve relaxed. She was tired. Last night had left her both weary and tense. The lights going out when Cally had started screaming had almost freaked her out. Thank God her daughter was only having a nightmare. But the knocking from the closed cupboard had been no dream and Gabe’s explanation that it was an airlock in the waterpipes inside the cupboard wasn’t convincing. But what else could the noise have been? Lying sleepless for much of the night with her imagination running wild had left her edgy and skittish this morning, only the service at St Mark’s calming her.


  In the church, and in the cold light of day, most of the night fears had been vanquished, common sense prevailing. That it had stopped raining and the sun could find periods of cloud breakthrough had helped accommodate logic – it really had been the waterpipes causing the disturbance and it really was a draught beneath the floorboards that had caused the rattling of the cupboard door – but doubt lingered. There was something strange about Crickley Hall, something dark, Eve could sense it. She could easily believe there were ghosts here.

  She leaned sideways and pressed her head into the embroidered cushion that rested against the couch’s arm. She closed her eyes.

  Gabe and Loren were still out looking for Chester, having come back for the car – oh God, Eve hoped they hadn’t lost him – and Cally was upstairs playing in her bedroom. Lunch wasn’t a problem: microwaving a couple of the freezer-packs they’d bought in Hollow Bay yesterday wouldn’t take long. Sunday lunch was usually a roast, but Gabe and the girls wouldn’t mind missing it for one week.

  Her eyelids flickered, opened once more. The sitting room, with its high windows and long beige drapes, was one of the nicer rooms in the house, although there was still an air of austerity about it. The windows were almost filled with the trees and greenery of the gorge slope and riverbank so that they were like natural murals. The wallpaper was old, traditional, but its flowery pattern at least cheered the room a little. The couch itself faced an oakwood and brick fireplace where Gabe had laid and lit a fire that morning to chase away the room’s chill. The heat from it did not stretch far, but nevertheless it was making Eve drowsy. She blinked, forced her eyes open.

  On a round occasional table opposite the couch were framed family photographs that they had brought with them to Crickley Hall and were among the first things Eve had displayed after the main items had been unpacked. They represented happier times. A wedding shot of Gabe and three-months-pregnant Eve, a large colour group shot of them all taken almost two years ago so it included Cam. To the fore was a small silver-framed picture of a brightly smiling Cam. She pushed away the thoughts, afraid of their conclusion. No body had been found, death could not be assumed. In the photograph, his hair, sweeping down almost to touch his eyebrows, was a striking yellow; when he grew it would probably darken, become shades closer to his father’s. But the vivacity of those cornflower-blue eyes – so like Gabe’s – would remain until old age paled them.

  Her eyes moistened.

  But her eyelids were heavy and a gentle warmth came from the coal and log fire.

  Eve drifted, consciousness waned. She slept. She dreamed.

  At the beginning it was bad, for although she slept she was still aware of the brooding house around her. She felt its chill, its shadows. She felt the misery that was in this place, in its memory, in its soul. Eve shivered in her sleep.

  There was something wrong inside this house – perhaps it was her subconscious that told her this – some grim secret kept within it. She heard distant whimpers, then quiet sobs. The sounds of misery. Of being lost.

  A tear squeezed through the corner of her eye, a silver droplet made red by the fire.

  There was something ominous contained – caged – within these stone walls. A truth that was unattainable. A secret. The word formed in her mind as though written in stark, unembellished letters.

  She stirred on the couch, twisting her neck to push her face into its cushioned back.

  In her dream she was being called, but no matter where she looked, the source lay hidden. Faraway though it was, the voice was that of a child and its urgency was muted by the distance.

  And suddenly Eve was dreaming of herself: she was looking down at her own sleeping body as though her mind had left it and was floating near the ceiling. Now her physical self was no longer inside the house. Instead, she was somewhere that was full of green space, a place where children played, where her own child, little Cally, slumbered in her buggy close by the bench, while her brother, almost one year older, played in the sandpit not far away.

  Something was wrong, though. Something was terribly wrong. Yet still the body below her – her real self – slept on.

  Five-year-old Cameron was slowly vanishing as sand ran through his tiny fingers to pile around and over his bent knees. Disappearing as a whole, not bit by bit, but fading as if a white fog was enveloping him. And still Eve dreamed, unaware of this dangerous decline of her son, sleeping as his image weakened, dimmed from sight, smothered by the fog.

  Then she became aware of another presence in her dream, although this was so clear, so real, that she wondered – in her dream – if she was no longer asleep. The dark but sharp silhouette of a man loomed over her. The figure had narrow shoulders and a thin physique, and as he leaned towards her, his shadowed face only inches away from hers, there came a smell that was strange yet somehow familiar, an odour that mingled with his own thick rancid breath. She tried to turn her head away, but twin lights from the dark caverns of his deep-set eyes held her there mesmerized and afraid. Eve no longer viewed herself from above – she was back inside herself. She felt a huge pressure on her, weighing her down.

  He exhaled and his breath was worse than before: it was stinking, fetid, the scent of a putrid cesspit. Yet still there was that underlying scent, the pungent odour of . . . of detergent? She felt scrutinized, inspected; she felt dread. Eve shrank away, but the head, with its gleaming inset pinpoint eyes, followed her. Although still shadowed, the features of the dream-visitor were revealed: he had a sharp, hooked nose, prominent, as his cleft chin was prominent above a thin scrawny neck; she still could not tell the colour of his eyes, she could only see those two gleaming lights that shone from them, reflections only but like searchlights used by him to scour her soul. That this man was wicked, she had no doubt; it was as evident as the malodour that came through his thin lips.

  He raised a big-knuckled hand to her cheek, his bony fingers curled. He drew the hand down the skin of her face and, although his touch was weak, his flesh seemed to scratch against her own. In the dream and in the reality she gave out an anguished cry.

  A lump of coal on the fire cracked with the heat, but its sound – and the sound of her own cry – failed to rouse her. Still she lay in troubled sleep. She groaned. Her leg flexed, an arm crossed her breasts, hand gripping her shoulder.

  The nightmare should have awakened her, as such fantasies do when they become unbearable, but it failed and she dreamt on.

  She reared away from the cold touch and just when the terror was at its zenith, she felt the clawed hand withdraw to be replaced by another touch, one that was gentle and soothing. A small soft hand was stroking her cheek and the fear very slowly began to leave her.

  Her body relaxed and the touching of this little hand – a child’s hand – was healing, driving away both terror . . . and guilt. She had the vaguest impression of a child’s featureless face under a mop of hair so fair it looked white, but the image was both weak and fleeting. The nightmare faltered, became nebulous, finally left her.

  She called out his name, a question.

  ‘Cameron?’

  And it was the sound of her own voice that finally woke her.

  She stirred, almost reluctantly opening her eyes, not wanting the serenity to end, hoping to find it was real.

  But the ‘presence’ vanished with the awakening.

  ‘Cameron?’ she said again, and even though there was no reply, the wonderful peace was not completely gone.

  Eve sat up and looked around as if expecting to find her son somewhere in the room with her. But the room was empty of any other person. Nothing had changed.

  Except the photograph of Cam on the nearby table had fallen on the floor.

  It lay on its side, supported by the strut at the back, and Cam’s eyes seemed to be looking directly into her own.

  And although his photograph drew her attention, she was aware that there was something else different about the high-ceilinged sitting room. That odd aroma still scented the air
and she now recognized the smell. It was the sharp reek of carbolic soap; it was all that was left of the dream.

  16: CHESTER

  ‘Hold on to Chester while I find something to tie him with.’

  Gabe rose to his feet, a dark damp patch on the knees of his jeans where he had been kneeling on the wet grass. He hung on to the dog’s collar until Loren took over.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said soothingly into the animal’s cocked ear. ‘Nothing to be frightened of, is there?’ She wrapped an arm round Chester’s neck.

  Gabe shook his head in bemused irritation. He’d tried to coax their pet up to Crickley Hall’s front door, but the dog wasn’t having it. The more Gabe pulled, the more Chester squatted on his haunches and dug his paws into the turf. Gabe couldn’t understand the mutt’s fear. Sure, there wasn’t much that was homely about the Hall, nothing comfortable about it, but it was just a house, stone, mortar and timber. Maybe Chester was picking up vibes from Eve, who seemed to think Crickley Hall was haunted. Wacky, maybe, but Gabe didn’t want to argue with her; his wife was still in an ultra-sensitive state. Which was why he had promised to find somewhere else to rent if she hadn’t settled in after two weeks – no, one week now. He was sure she’d change her mind once she got rid of the idea that there were ghosts in the place. But in the meantime, what to do about Chester?

  Gabe and Loren had found the runaway half a mile up the lane, heading for unknown territory. He had stopped by the side of the road when Gabe and Loren drove up, his head high and eyes bright as though he recognized the Range Rover. And there had been no problem in getting him to hop up onto the back seat, his short-haired stumpy tail wagging happily, responding to Loren’s hugs and kisses enthusiastically. But when Gabe turned the 4x4 around and began heading back to Crickley Hall, Chester had become agitated again.

  Gabe had to pick up the dog and carry his skinny quivering body across the bridge and then he had to drag the mongrel by his collar across the lawn towards the house’s solid front door. Chester had protested all the way, his brown eyes bulging. Gabe had reluctantly taken him back to the oak tree where the swing hung, holding down his exasperation more for Loren’s sake than for Chester’s; the dog’s panic was upsetting her.