The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

  After a meagre meal of mincemeat and boiled potatoes (this was to be their staple diet from that day on) they were sent up to the dormitory, which was a capacious converted attic where iron cotbeds were set out. There was no excited chatter between the children as they undressed for bed. At the orphanage, Susan had been allowed to tell bedtime stories, but not here in Crickley Hall: the children were instructed to go to sleep immediately after Magda had switched off the lights.

  They were an austere twosome, Cribben and his sister Magda, and they made it clear from the start that they would tolerate no dissension or misbehaviour from the children in their charge. Ominously, Cribben had used his split-ended cane the very next morning when Eugene Smith, nine years old, was late down for the assembly in the hall (the orphans had to present themselves washed and dressed in two lines at precisely six thirty every morning). Breakfast would follow after prayers in the big drawing room, which also doubled as a classroom. Eugene hadn’t appeared ’til the rest were all seated at the two long trestle tables that were used as desks during school time, and Cribben had flown into a fearsome rage. The nine-year-old was made to bend over in front of the others and Cribben administered six hard strokes of the cane.

  Swish-thwack! Maurice had never forgotten that sound. Neither had he forgotten Eugene’s screech of pain. Swish-thwack! Six times. By the end of the caning, Eugene had been reduced to a blubbering wreck.

  Cribben and Magda’s very presence was intimidating – no, it was downright scary – and Maurice knew he had to ingratiate himself with them as quickly as possible. He was not only big for his age, long and gangly, but he was also smarter than the other children and certainly more cunning. He did not relish that cane leaving red stripes across his own backside and he determined to do anything to avoid it.

  As luck would have it, his chance to gain favour with the Cribbens came the very next day.

  The parents and baby brother of two of the evacuees, Brenda and Gerald Prosser, had been killed one night in the Blitz when a German bomb had fallen on their home (the father had been on leave from the army at the time, prior to being shipped overseas). Their parents’ bedroom, in which the one-year-old baby also slept, had been totally demolished, while Brenda and Gerald’s bedroom had hardly been touched. With no relatives to take them in, the sister and brother had been sent to the orphanage. That had been almost three years ago, and ever since the deaths of their parents and sibling, they had feared the nights, afraid that a bomb might drop and this time kill them too. So they had taken to sleeping, sometimes together, beneath their beds. The punishment of their friend Eugene had traumatized them so much that on the second night at Crickley Hall, Brenda had taken the blankets (there were no sheets) from her own and Gerald’s bed and laid them on the floor under her bed. They had slept the night there, cuddling together. Maurice, who was a natural sneak, had informed on them the next day. As punishment the Prossers had been caned across the palms of their hands, six strokes each, with Gerald collapsing in wails and tears after the third stroke. Magda had to support him and force his arm straight so that Cribben could finish the chastisement. Both children were left with livid red weals on the hands and their punishment noted in a big black book that Cribben kept.

  And so it continued, Maurice telling tales on the other orphans and soon earning small rewards for the betrayals. Discipline at Crickley Hall was rigid, unbending, the rules of the house too many for Maurice to remember now, but severe punishment was the penalty for breaking them. Sometimes it would be Cribben’s cane or Magda’s strap (she always wore a thick leather belt round her waist which she would snap at any rule-breaker’s hands and legs). Other times it might be fasting for a day, or being made to stand silently in a corner for six hours or more. Toys and board games were not allowed, even though Maurice knew there were some in the house because he had helped Magda carry them – they were sent by orphan-concerned charities – up to the storeroom next to the dormitory, where they were locked away. On Saturday mornings, however, the evacuees were allowed to play on the swing the young gardener had rigged up for them on the front lawn. Only two at a time though, just for the benefit of passers-by who would think it was part of the children’s recreational fun. In particular, it was meant to impress the vicar of St Mark’s, the church further down the hill; the Reverend Rossbridger liked to pop in for tea and biscuits with the Cribbens from time to time. It was not long before even those innocent sessions on the swing became another form of punishment.

  Maurice quickly became Magda’s preferred child and loyal servant to Augustus Cribben himself. The other children hated him for this (as they had hated him in the London orphanage before) because they knew he spied on them, that he reported the slightest misdemeanour on their part to the Cribbens, and that he stirred up problems for them with their guardians. Susan Trainer got into the most trouble, because Maurice disliked her in particular – she was too lippy and always defending the smaller kids, especially the Polish boy. Stefan Rosenbaum was constantly picked on by Cribben and Magda; that Stefan understood very little English didn’t help matters.

  But Maurice enjoyed it all. He liked the strictness and it was fun to see the other boys and girls get punished. He loved the brutality of the canings. And quite soon Cribben saw Maurice’s potential.

  55: LIGHTNING

  Gabe was heading west in the Range Rover and making reasonably good time despite the Friday-night exodus from the city. Now on the motorway, he was able to pick up speed, illegally keeping to the fast lane, once again flashing his headlights at any vehicle that impeded his progress, tailgating them if they didn’t pull into the middle lane. It was a foolish thing to do, reckless and heedless of others, but he wanted to reach Hollow Bay as quickly as possible. He was in no mood to dally.

  Eve had not wanted him to return to Crickley Hall that night because she felt he would be too exhausted both physically and emotionally. She would comfort Loren and Cally when she broke the terrible news to them. They, in turn, would console each other. For him to drive back that night was too big a risk, especially as it was raining still.

  But Gabe hadn’t liked the sound of his wife’s voice. It was too dispassionate. Eve was too calm, too collected. She had to be in shock. Maybe she had nothing left, her emotions wrung out. Whatever the answer, Gabe had to be there with his wife and daughters; they would need his love and support, as he needed theirs.

  Rain suddenly hit the windscreen so fiercely he was momentarily driving blind. He eased up on the accelerator and turned the wipers on to a swifter speed. Other vehicles were also slowing down and he groaned aloud. He didn’t need this.

  The change from light drizzle to absolute downpour was dramatic and unexpected, like driving into a waterfall. Gabe saw that the sky ahead was black and, just to make things worse, there was a lightning flash that bleached road and countryside, followed by the distant rumble of thunder.

  Gabe swore and flicked his headlights at another driver who was blocking his way. He pressed down harder on the accelerator pedal and once more gathered speed.

  56: MEMORIES

  He drained the last of the Hennessy and pondered whether or not to have another. Glancing at his watch, he decided it was still too early to leave.

  Rising from the table, Maurice went to the bar. An attractive but rather sluttish girl, who had arrived a short while ago, was serving. The man Maurice assumed was the landlord or pub manager was standing at the far end of the counter, talking to a couple of customers. The place was just beginning to get busy.

  Maurice ordered another large brandy, his third, and smiled at the girl he’d heard the landlord call Frannie. Keep the change, he told her, and took his drink back to the small table.

  The old man with the cloth cap was still gazing into the fire. Frannie had livened it up with a few fresh logs when she had come on duty. The fire-gazer had an inch or so of the half-bitter left in his glass and Maurice wondered if it would take him another half-hour to drain it.

  Maur
ice sipped his own drink, enjoying its bite, taking his time because he had plenty of that, plenty of time yet.

  He settled comfortably in the chair and went back to his memories.

  Augustus Theophilus Cribben was a deviant: a masochist and a sadist. But Maurice did not understand such terms in those days. In fact, to Maurice, Cribben was a kind of god. And in three short weeks, the boy was to become an acolyte of the god. He always remained afraid of Cribben, but still he idolized him. Cribben was lord and master of Crickley Hall and Maurice was only too pleased to be his servant, for it gave him power too: domination over the other children, influence with Magda, and the approval of his master – especially that.

  He found ways to please Cribben and Magda, watching over the other orphans, controlling them whenever Cribben or his sister was not present, making them stand in two straight lines at assembly in the hall, reporting them if they talked or played after lights out, and generally conspiring with the guardians to make life miserable for the evacuees. When they all marched down the hill to church on Sunday mornings, Maurice always walked at the back with Magda, ready to point out any chatter or mischief from the boys and girls in front. He also kept alert during the Mass, on the lookout for misbehaviour or whisperings among them.

  Soon, he had inveigled his way so much into his guardians’ good books that he was allowed to stay up long after the others had gone to bed, although he had the habit of sitting on the narrow staircase just below the open hatchway so that he could listen to anything they might whisper about the Cribbens or himself. Augustus Cribben never seemed to sleep: he would walk the landing, pace the flagstoned hall, climb the broad stairway – and sometime’s stop at the bottom of the narrow staircase leading to the dormitory, waiting there as if listening for the slightest noise, the quietest of murmurs, hoping to catch the children out, ready to stomp up those wooden steps and deal out immediate punishment – he always carried the cane with him. Then, in the evenings, he began to take Maurice to his bedroom.

  There he would instruct the boy to kneel at the bedside with him and pray. Such prayers could go on for two hours or more and such was Cribben’s fervour, so intense were his supplications, that Maurice’s boredom was never noticed.

  It was on one of those nights that something took place that was totally bizarre to the boy – bizarre then, but soon, with repetition, becoming an acceptable part of the evening ritual.

  Cribben had been suffering a severe headache all day. Migraine, Magda had informed Maurice when they were alone one day, a condition Augustus had endured all his adult life and which was made worse when they were caught up in an air raid, the house they occupied demolished by a German bomb. Augustus had been trapped in the parlour, beneath half the ceiling that had fallen in, sustaining a serious injury to his head. His life was spared, but from that day the migraine attacks were even worse than before. So bad had they become that sometimes the pain carried him to the very brink of insanity. The attacks were punishment for his past sins, her brother had declared, and this he truly believed even though his life had been pure, his adoration of the Lord absolute.

  But one day, Augustus suddenly knew what must be done to relieve this sickly pounding in his head, for it came to him as an epiphany: only further pain, further punishment, could release him from his affliction; only this further penance could absolve him of his sins and thus take away his suffering. Pain defeated by more pain. Magda would have to punish him to the limit of his endurance so that his sins would be washed away by the physical contrition.

  One night, as Maurice prayed with Cribben, intoning prayer after prayer, most of them of repentance, the guardian had leaned his head on the bed, his hands clawing at the single sheet. Cribben’s face had been ashen all day, his treatment of the evacuees even more stern than usual. At times he had clutched his head in his hands and moaned and even Magda had been wary around him, as if he might explode into violence at any moment. Instinctively, the children had become more subdued than usual (if that were possible) and had avoided even meeting his pain-raddled eyes. They crept quietly around him, never once raising their voices beyond a murmur.

  Maurice, kneeling beside Cribben at the bed, watched with a kind of awed anticipation as his master’s shoulders jerked with smothered sobs.

  After several moments, Cribben seemed to pull himself together. He turned towards Maurice, who saw his guardian’s gaunt face was even whiter than usual and drawn with the agony of his headache; tear trails glistened on Cribben’s hollowed cheeks.

  ‘You have a duty, boy,’ he said to Maurice tightly. He pointed to the commodious wardrobe that dominated one side of the room. ‘You’re tall, Maurice: you can reach it.’

  The boy was confused as he gawked first at the wardrobe, then back at the kneeling figure.

  Cribben’s order seemed squeezed through his lips, as if pain and impatience were constricting his throat. ‘Fetch it, boy!’ he hissed.

  Bewildered, Maurice nevertheless scuttled over to the big wardrobe. He regarded it blankly.

  ‘You’ll find it hidden away on top,’ Cribben told him fretfully. ‘If you stretch you can reach it. Hurry, fetch it to me!’

  Anxiously, Maurice stood on tiptoe and raised his arms above his head, his taut belly pressed against the wardrobe’s closed door. He ran his fingertips along the edge and felt nothing at first. But when he stretched himself even higher, his whole body straining with the effort, he touched something lying there out of sight. It was light, for it moved easily when he nudged it. Working his fingers to draw the object closer, he soon realized what Cribben wanted brought to him. He pulled the long thin stick off the wardrobe and faced the guardian with it.

  Like the punishment cane Cribben flogged the children with, this was split into several strands at one end; however, there were tiny iron studs impressed into the separate slithers of wood, there to inflict even greater pain when used as a scourge.

  ‘Yes,’ was all that Cribben said as he rose from the bed, his eyes glazed with either tears or fervour, and proceeded to remove his jacket. The rest of his clothes followed until he was completely naked. Maurice’s eyes widened when he saw the stripes and barely healed weals on Cribben’s body, across his chest but mainly across his thighs and lower legs. The studs had also left their marks as small red puncture wounds and short sore-looking scratches. The boy understood that the cane had been used on Cribben before – many times before, for some of the marks were old and faded while others were fresh, almost livid.

  ‘This is my personal instrument of chastisement – it hasn’t been sullied by those sinful wretches. You know what to do, Maurice. You must do it fiercely,’ Cribben urged – no, he implored – the boy, who was still afraid and uncertain.

  He jumped when Cribben screamed at him.

  ‘Punish me! Let the pain absolve me of my sins!’

  What those sins could have been, Maurice had no idea, for his God-fearing master was surely without the stain of sin upon his soul. But then, who could tell what dark and covert thoughts tortured the man? Maurice only knew that his own mind possessed many thoughts and images that might be deemed sinful.

  Cribben knelt at the bedside again and he threw his upper body across it so that his back and buttocks were exposed. Maurice felt a strange thrill of excitement.

  ‘Make it hurt, boy, let me feel its sting!’

  In shock, and without further thought, the boy obliged, though his first couple of strokes were tentative.

  ‘Harder, boy, harder!’ Cribben shouted.

  Maurice brought the cane down harder, the strokes clearly defined on the guardian’s pale flesh, together with small pricks of blood made by the metal studs.

  Swish-thwack!

  ‘Lord, let the pain wash away the corruption of my spirit, help me atone for the evil that is mine!’

  Swish-thwack!

  Maurice struck with more passion, enjoying the sound the cane made on skin and bones, encouraged by the whimpers and cries it brought from his master �
�� excited by the hurt he was causing. Oh, it was glorious. It aroused feelings inside him that he’d never before experienced. It made his groin tingle and caused a new and exquisite sensation, a wonderful feeling that he wanted to go on for ever.

  Cribben, his face laid sideways on the bed so that the boy could see his expression, seemed to be in some kind of delirium, his open lips formed into an agonized grin, his eyelids fluttering as if he were about to faint. His hips were inches away from the bedside and Maurice saw something he didn’t quite understand, something he’d never seen on any other man or boy before.

  Cribben’s erection was enormous, its engorged globular tip pressed into the bed’s thin mattress.

  ‘Yes,’ the guardian moaned in a low, parched voice. ‘Yes, more. Harder now!’

  Eventually Cribben had had enough. ‘Good boy, good boy,’ he gasped as he rested his head and shoulders on the bed. ‘Go to your room now, boy, and pray for your soul. Mine too. Go.’ He sounded exhausted.

  Maurice had walked to the door and opened it to find Magda waiting outside on the landing. She had been silent but a wisp of a smile had told Maurice she was pleased with his labours.

  The flogging of his master was not the last. It was just the beginning.

  57: FRIDAY EVENING

  Lili had closed the shop and gone upstairs to her flat. It had been a slow day, unusual for a Friday, but the lack of trade hadn’t bothered her too much. Business was always good around Christmas-time and, of course, in the summer months when tourists were like locusts in this part of town. She could have used some distraction that day, however.