The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

  Leaning close to her ear, Maurice asked, ‘Are we catching the train? Are we going to London?’

  There was no response, but he assumed that was the idea, to get back to the city where no one would find them and no one could blame them for what had happened in Crickley Hall – and he was, after all, only a child. Maurice saw no future beyond that.

  As the hours moved on to dawn, the storm abated and the winds died. They weren’t to know that the gorge and Hollow Bay had been flooded and that there was no one left at Crickley Hall to bear witness to what had taken place there. No, Maurice and Magda were in their own world, Maurice drenched and shivering, hunched up as close to Magda as he could get, she still staring straight ahead, also drenched but her body rigid, her face expressionless, features hard as if made of stone.

  As often was the case in the aftermath of a heavy storm, the morning was bright and clear, the smell of raw damp earth heavy in the air. Somewhere in the distance there came the clang-clang of a fire-engine bell.

  Still they waited and the sun began to dry out their clothes a little. Eventually, someone strolled out of the ticket office onto the platform, but it was too far away for the man to see them properly. As the hours went by, more people arrived on the platform, but none wandered down to the far end. Only Maurice was looking – Magda was still in a place of her own – and he saw a uniformed station master or guard step out of his office and check his pocket-watch, then glance towards them.

  Maurice, sitting on Magda’s right-hand side, sat back so that he was shielded by her body. He felt guilty, because they hadn’t bought tickets.

  All the uniformed man saw was a lone woman dressed entirely in black waiting for the morning train at the far end of the station. She was too far away to make out her features, although he could tell her face was very pale. He checked his watch again, a piece that had served him well for twenty years with its large sharp numbers and fine black hands, then peered in the opposite direction to the single woman, towards the west. He sensed the rumble on the railtracks before he actually heard it, a trick he’d picked up over the years – it was as if the rails were trembling ahead of the sound – and his eyes squinted as he waited for the London train to appear round the bend half a mile away.

  For the benefit of the waiting passengers on the platform, he barked out the train’s ultimate destination and the major towns it stopped at along the way.

  Maurice heard the station man call out London and he ducked his head forward to see the train’s approach. It soon chugged in and with a hiss of steam and a squeal of brakes the engine and first carriage came to a halt just past him. Doors began to open and slam shut again. No passengers alighted, for this was the train’s first stop after leaving its departure point of Ilfracombe.

  He looked at Magda, but she was not paying attention, she was just staring at the cream and dark-red carriage that was opposite them. He tugged urgently at her elbow and she took no notice.

  ‘Magda,’ he said in a quick hushed voice as if others might hear, ‘we must get on. It’ll take us to London. Please, Magda, before it starts up again.’

  No response though. She was like an alabaster statue sitting there, so white was her colour, so still was her body.

  ‘Please, Magda!’ He was desperate now.

  And then, when she wouldn’t move, wouldn’t acknowledge him, a coldness flushed through Maurice. He was completely alone again. The alliance between himself, Augustus and Magda was over. Augustus would be sent to jail for what he’d done – even hanged – and Magda would lose her job. No, worse than that. For murdering the teacher, Nancy Linnet, she would be put in prison for the rest of her life. Unless she told the police and the judge that he, Maurice, had struck the fatal blow that killed Miss Linnet, and she had only helped him get rid of the body. She wouldn’t tell them it was she who had pushed the teacher down the stairs, she would blame it all on him!

  He slid a few inches away from Magda on the bench and searched her profile. Would she tell on him? She didn’t seem right in the head, it was as if something had closed down inside her. Why wouldn’t she speak to him, why did she just sit there?

  The slamming of the doors had finished now and he peeked past his silent companion to see the station man looking in the opposite direction, checking all the carriage doors were shut and there were no more passengers trying to board at that end.

  Maurice knew he had to make a decision right then. If the police caught him they’d send him to Borstal, where all the bad boys went; or maybe, even worse, they’d put him in a grown-up prison because that’s what they did with anyone who had murdered another person. Perhaps they’d even hang him, like Augustus. How old did you have to be before you got the rope?

  Maurice ran for the carriage as a whistle blew and, once aboard and the train was slowly moving out of the station, he looked through a window at the solitary figure sitting there on the platform bench. Magda did not seem to see him as he passed.

  Maurice Stafford – the older Maurice Stafford, no longer a boy but a man of seventy-five years who now lived under a different name – tried to flex his left knee in the limited space beneath the Mondeo’s steering wheel. His leg always felt worse when the weather was cold or wet, a flaw in his otherwise healthy body, and he thought back to when the injury had occurred.

  The accident had happened when he was still a boy scavenging in the ruins of the bomb-blasted city, stealing from grocery shops whose owners displayed their wares – fruit (limited) and vegetables (basic) – outside in boxes on the pavement, or from barrows in the markets. At night he slept in partially demolished houses, and on particularly cold nights he went to the underground shelters that some families still used even though the bombing appeared to have stopped (this was before the flying bombs, the V-1s and V-2s, Hitler’s newest weapons, began their reign of terror). Most of the families shared their rations with him after he had explained that his father had died overseas and that his mother was an ambulance driver on call that night – he would tell anxious women that his mother always dropped him at a shelter before she went on to do her duty. It was never difficult to attach himself to families or women.

  In fact, he had used a large family group – three boys, one about his own age, two girls and their mother – to get past the ticket collector on the day he’d arrived in the heart of the capital on the West Country train, the day he had left Magda Cribben sitting alone on the distant platform. From their chatter, he had gleaned that the boys and girls were evacuees like himself and that their mother had decided to bring them home to London now that the bombings had stopped; it was simple to merge with them among all the other arrivals, then pass unnoticed through the barrier, the collector having no time to count the tickets.

  The hauntings had begun just before he broke his leg – indeed the first one was the prime cause of the injury. It had been a chilly April night and he was in a house whose upper floors had been gutted. Maurice snuck into a corner over creaky floorboards, pulling the collar of the over-sized overcoat that a kindly market porter had given him tight around his neck and jaw. Moonlight shone through two glassless windows, spreading across the floor of what once must have been a front parlour. All furniture and ornaments had been salvaged (or looted), for the room was quite empty save for rubble and shattered glass. Weary from a morning’s work and roaming the bustling streets – war or no war, the city carried on as normal, the difference being that most of the women wore cheap, dull or homemade clothes, while the majority of men were middle-aged or elderly, those that were younger usually wearing military uniforms, and there were walls of sandbags protecting doorways and tape criss-crossing windows – Maurice soon drifted off to a fractured sleep, too uncomfortable and cold to lie peacefully.

  He wasn’t sure what woke him – a policeman outside on his rounds, an ARP warden on his way somewhere – something had interrupted his uneasy slumber anyway. He peeked out from his corner, the lapel tips of his coat touching over his chin. If there had been a noi
se – maybe a rat scuttling through the debris – it was gone now. Maurice snuggled down again, a shoulder fitting into the corner, but no sooner had he closed his eyes than he opened them again. Squinting, he peered into the shadowy corners opposite. There was someone standing in one of them, he was sure. Someone moving in the blackness. Moving out as if to cross the room in his direction.

  He gave a little whimper and drew his knees up to his chest, trying to make himself smaller, less easily seen. The shape stopped in the clearly defined light from one of the windows and he saw that it was a man. And there was something familiar about him, the skinny body, the white hair lit by the moon, the rigid stance. Maurice recognized who it was from that alone.

  How had Augustus Cribben found him here in London? How could he know where Maurice sheltered? Why was he naked? How could he walk through the rubble without disturbing it or making a noise? Then the boy realized the moonlight was shining through the figure! Maurice caught his breath.

  At the orphanage before Crickley Hall, one of the female carers, a hefty woman with a ruddy face and wiry hair, had delighted in telling the children bedtime stories about hauntings, and she had claimed that all ghosts were transparent, you could see right through them. And now Maurice could see the shape of the smashed windows through Augustus Cribben.

  The boy’s eyes bulged as if ready to pop from their sockets, and the hairs at the back of his neck seemed to divide and stand straight. Was Cribben dead? Was this his ghost?

  Maurice screeched, a high-pitched terrified sound that shot through the murky London air. He scrambled to his feet, his shoulder brushing against the wall, wiping off dirt and dust, while the ghost, now unmoving, looked on. The boy screeched again, pushing his back into the corner as if to sink through it. The room had become bitterly cold and Maurice saw his own breath materialize in front of him. The limpid image of Augustus Cribben remained still, but Maurice could feel the eyes, even though they were hidden in shadows, boring into his.

  Never before had Maurice been so frightened, not even when he and Magda had run out of Crickley Hall all those months ago. It was as if something bad, something frigid had seized his mind, his body. What did the ghost want from him?

  With a panicky wail, he made a dash for the doorless opening on the other side of the room, skirting round the flimsy vision that merely turned to follow his progress. He was halfway there when the bomb-weakened floorboards collapsed inwards, sending Maurice plummeting down into the basement below.

  Timber and bricks fell with him, three bricks joined together glancing off his head, debris of cracked floorboards landing on his left leg, pinning it to the stone floor. The blow to the head, although stunning him and causing blood to pour, failed to distract him from the pain of his broken leg.

  Maurice screamed and screamed before passing out and the last thing he saw as he slipped into unconsciousness was a face looking down at him from the opening above. It wasn’t Cribben’s face.

  An indistinct bulk sitting in the darkness of the car, he bit into his lip. The rain, the wind, was unremitting and Maurice flinched at the bitter torment of memories.

  His mood had changed. The calmness had left him for the moment.

  It had been the first of the hauntings that were eventually to undermine his sanity. Followed by the dreams that had lost him his freedom for a while when he was young.

  The man who had rescued him from the cellar (and perhaps who had chased away the ghost) was an ARP warden called Henry Pyke, and he and his wife, Dorothy, would play an important part in the boy’s life from then on.

  The national dailies carried the story of the ‘mystery boy’ found in the ruins of a building and who had lost his memory due to a blow to his head (it was thought). It made the front pages for more than a week, his photograph, which had been taken while he was in hospital recovering from his injuries, printed large for the first three days, the caption beneath appealing for anyone who knew the boy’s identity to come forward. No one ever did. The picture released to the press was too bleached out, worse when it was reproduced, and a bandage covered his forehead, so that even the market traders for whom he had done odd jobs failed to recognize him.

  The boy had been unable to tell the authorities anything about himself – what his name was, who his parents were, how he came to be in the bomb-gutted house where he was found. His photograph was even circulated among the troops in England and abroad, but still no one claimed him for their own. Eventually it was suggested that perhaps both his parents had perished in the earlier Blitz, and the boy, lost and confused, had roamed the streets ever since. There appeared to be no other explanation.

  Public interest waned and the story was relegated to a couple of column inches on the inside pages, while the front-page headlines returned to more urgent world events.

  The anonymous boy spent the next six months in hospital recovering from his injuries – his left leg had been badly broken – and the doctors hoped his memory would return of its own accord. But it never did.

  Because of his size and his evident maturity, the patient’s age was approximated at fourteen years, and Maurice, whose memory was fine, did not disagree with them (he was by now thirteen years of age anyway). Henry Pyke, the Air Raid Precautions warden who had discovered Maurice and carried him up from the cellar, had taken a special interest in the boy and had visited him several times a week at the hospital. As time went by and the ‘lost’ boy remained unclaimed, the warden began to bring his wife to see him. Theirs was a childless marriage and for years they had longed for a son or daughter. They grew so fond of Maurice, who was shy and well-mannered and had a wonderful shine to his eyes, that they decided that if the boy’s parents or relatives were not found soon, then they themselves would apply to adopt him for their own. And that was precisely what happened. The authorities had not known quite what to do with the amnesic boy, and the Pykes had provided the ideal solution. They would allow the couple, who were in their early forties and now unlikely to have a child themselves, to foster the boy for a year or so with a view to full adoption.

  Maurice Stafford, who had not forgotten his name or how he had returned to London, nor the horror he had left behind in Crickley Hall, was renamed Gordon Pyke.

  The Pykes were gloriously happy with their new-found son, who hobbled around on crutches while his injured leg strengthened, and the boy did his best to conceal the unpleasant side of his nature, a task that was not difficult for him over the first few months. But then the nightmares had begun, prompted, he had always felt, by the fresh attacks on the city, this time pilotless rockets sent over from the coasts of Europe by the desperate Germans. The doodlebugs, as the first V-1 rockets were nicknamed, brought hell back to the capital. The drone of their engines was feared, but the silence when the engines cut out and the flying bombs dropped through the sky were feared even more.

  Henry Pyke was killed while on duty in a school hall acquisitioned by the ARP when a doodlebug fell on it and completely destroyed the building. Seven other people lost their lives with him.

  The nightmares that came to plague young Gordon Pyke were intense and damaging. They made his nerves bad; they made him neurotic and paranoid.

  These terrible dreams varied in content but were constant over the years. In one (the first one he had), he is on a train and he can see Magda Cribben’s white face outside the window. Her mouth is open but he can’t hear her shouts. Her pale fingers claw at the glass as the train begins to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed, leaving Magda behind, her face ugly in its contortions. He is always struck by an acute loneliness as the train leaves the woman far behind. In another, he is standing at the foot of the stairs in Crickley Hall and all the other orphans who had been evacuated with him are higher up, each to a step, and he feels deep shame as they stare down at him, for he knows they are all dead. When they beckon him, silently inviting him to join them on the stairs, he doesn’t move. He can’t, he’s paralysed. So the dead start to come down to him and he can
see the emptiness in their eyes, the lifelessness of their corpses; he can smell their decay. In yet another, he is flagellating Augustus Cribben’s nude body with a bamboo cane, and as he does so, the skin parts, wounds open, Cribben’s abused body becomes raw red meat and no longer recognizable as human. But he can’t stop the flogging, he wields the cane until the meat begins to pulp, then disintegrate, and the gore puddles at the feet of the thing that is no longer a man but now a mashed carcass that starts to corrupt and rot and fall away until finally it is nothing more than boneless lumps of flesh in the spreading pool of blood. Even then he cannot stop; he continues to thrash the bloody mounds, and the cane itself becomes red and slippery until it slides from his hand and he falls to his knees in the muck he has created. He always woke up at that point, shivering yet sweaty, clammy, peering round frantically, searching for anything lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. The final nightmare in the cycle of four has him up to his neck in cold water that is as black as the space around him. A circle of dull grey light comes from high above, and when he feels the slimy walls they are circular. Naturally he is frightened in this predicament, but the real fear comes when he realizes there is something in the inky water with him. He can’t see it, but he can sense it. As something brittle, like the decayed fingers of a claw, wraps itself round his wrist he starts to scream and it becomes a real, waking scream that seems to rebound off the walls of his room.

  Yes, the dreams were bad, for their consistency as much as their nature, but it was the second appearance of the ghost that had him gibbering on the floor of his bedroom, his curled body pushed tightly into a corner, his hand scratching frantically at the wallpaper and his teeth chattering, his eyes bulging.

  It was late at night and he was lying in bed, just beginning to doze, hoping that his sleep would be dreamless, when he heard the familiar sound.

  Swish-thwack.