The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

  Like her young friend Susan, Brenda involuntarily urinates, and its stream spatters Cribben’s legs and feet. He takes no notice. His only purpose is to extinguish the lives of these disloyal and ill-behaved miscreants who had been given into his care. Nothing else matters.

  . . . And in her psychic vision, the unconscious Lili Peel was held aloft and was slowly being strangled. Her own legs jerked in the mud and grass on which she lay, and her eyeballs pushed against their lids, her tongue began to emerge from her mouth, as if she herself suffered the young girl’s imminent death. She started to panic, needing air, the hands that squeezed her neck so strong and relentless. But as life passed from the last child, so Lili escaped her corpse. Still senseless yet still ‘sensing’, Lili’s vision continued . . .

  Cribben allows the child’s lifeless body to fall on the floor. He retrieves the punishment cane that is lying on the landing. He stands still. Something is not quite right, but the torturous pounding inside his head will not allow clear thought. Has he dealt with all the children? He isn’t sure, he cannot think.

  It suddenly comes to him, though. Eleven evacuees had been sent to Crickley Hall, but despite his blinding pain he knows he has despatched only nine. Then he remembers Stefan Rosenbaum – the Jew! – has already been accounted for. That meant one was missing.

  Where was the eleventh child?

  Cribben resumes his search . . .

  And Lili lost the psychic nightmare, although not for long.

  73: INSANITY

  Eve drew up her legs, resting the flat of her foot on the small square landing at the turn of the staircase, ready to use the leverage to push herself up. She still didn’t know Pyke’s intentions, but there was no doubt that they were bad as far as she and Loren were concerned. And every instinct as a mother told her they would be particularly bad for Loren. As he talked, Pyke kept looking at her daughter, showing more interest in her than Eve. If she could keep him talking, they might get a chance to escape. Or Lili might possibly get back with help.

  He looked up at the window as stuttering lightning bleached all its glass white again. He waited for the thunder to die away before he spoke.

  ‘So what did Augustus Cribben want from me?’ The question was put mildly enough and Eve was aware that it was rhetorical. ‘What caused him to reach out from his grave to me? If I were psychic I might have known long ago. If Augustus’s spectre were stronger, he might have been able to communicate his needs to me.’

  Pyke’s smile was bitter.

  ‘It was only comparatively recently that I found the answer,’ he said. ‘God only knows why I hadn’t done it long ago – at least I would have the reason for the hauntings that have affected my state of mind all these years.’

  Let him talk, Eve advised herself. Pretend interest and let him ramble. She exerted pressure on Loren’s shoulder to warn her she was going to make a move soon, and was reassured when her daughter pressed a hand against Eve’s back as if to say she would be ready. Pyke’s lengthy narrative had allowed Loren to get over her initial panic, although she was still rigid with fear.

  Eve continued to force herself to be polite and rational. ‘Why does there have to be an explanation for Augustus Cribben to haunt you? Doesn’t that sort of thing just happen?’

  ‘No, dear woman, it does not just “happen”,’ he chided her. ‘There are always reasons for hauntings. Some people may bear a grudge when they pass over and their spirit returns for revenge. Or the deaths might have been so traumatic that the spirit does not even realize he or she is dead. Sometimes there is some unfinished business or other left behind that has to be resolved. The last of these applies to Augustus Cribben.’

  Pyke frowned as though the thought disturbed him more than he could say.

  ‘You see, Eve, Augustus had eleven evacuees in his charge here at Crickley Hall.’ He emphasized the number again. ‘Eleven children. That last night he’d punished only nine, all slain by his own hands. He knew the Jewish boy, Stefan, had died earlier, his body despatched by myself and Magda, but it still meant only ten children – his children – were dead. So where was the final one, the eleventh child?’

  He had posed the question as though expecting an answer from Eve. When she didn’t respond he seemed disappointed. Pyke continued.

  ‘Of course, I was the eleventh evacuee in his care. Maurice Stafford, my name then, was the missing child. Augustus wasn’t aware I’d run away with Magda, with me in fear for my life and Magda in fear for her future. Who knows? He was so uncontrolled he might even have killed his own sister.’

  Pyke breathed out along sigh of resignation. ‘Augustus wanted to claim all the children. That was his right, they had been given to him.’

  Eve discreetly rose on an elbow, very slowly so that Pyke would not notice. An awful suspicion was beginning to dawn on her.

  ‘I only understood this,’ he went on, ‘when I went through the journals of that period in a public library. October 1943. The Hollow Bay flood made all the front pages, even though there was a war going on. After all, sixty-eight people were drowned or crushed to death in the disaster and the village was almost destroyed. Even more poignantly, so the newspapers pointed out, eleven of those who died that night were orphans who had been evacuated from London for their own safety. Eleven children who were in the care of Augustus Cribben.’

  Pyke nodded to himself. ‘There was the answer for me, laid out in stark black and white print on the front page of the national dailies. Such tragic irony. Children sent to the safety of the country because London in wartime was too dangerous.

  ‘Two of the evacuees’ bodies were never recovered and it was assumed they had been swept out to sea by the river that runs beneath the house. After all, the rest of the orphans’ bodies had been discovered in the cellar where there was a well to the underground river, so the assumption was natural enough. No one knew that Stefan’s body had been dumped in the well on another day, and I, of course, had absconded to London.’

  Eve and Loren were almost sitting erect on the stairway by now and Eve’s dread was deepening. She forced herself to speak normally. I still don’t understand what this has to do with us.’ She said this despite her suspicion.

  He took a sudden step towards them and stamped his walking stick on the bare boards of the small landing. Both of them flinched.

  Don’t you see?’ he said excitedly. Isn’t it clear to you after all I’ve said? The eleventh child doesn’t have to be me: it can be another child!’

  The shock, her suspicion now voiced, caused Eve to collapse back on the stairs. Loren squeezed her mother’s arm in a tight vice.

  Pyke leaned towards them, sinister, threatening, yet his voice still pleasant. When I read the local rag’s story of a haunting at Crickley Hall, two trespassing children claiming they had seen the ghost of a naked man in the house, I knew the ghost of Augustus Cribben had returned to Crickley Hall – perhaps it had never gone away! The newspaper story said a family was renting the house, a husband and wife with two daughters, one of them twelve years old, exactly my own age when I stayed here in 1943. It couldn’t have been more perfect!’

  The insanity in Pyke’s eyes was dangerously bright.

  ‘His plaguing of me had become more intense of late, more powerful, and now I understood why. The conditions had become so appropriate!’

  ‘Mummy—’ Loren began to say, but Pyke’s zealous babble cut her off.

  ‘Loren can substitute for me, don’t you see? I was his favourite, but I know he’ll accept another child in my place. I’m sure he will approve my sacrifice to him. Augustus will have his eleventh child and I’ll finally be free.’

  Eve could not help herself. You’re completely mad. This whole thing is crazy. The police will find you. Lili will tell them you were here and attacked her. They’ll lock you away for life.’

  He actually chuckled. ‘Would that really matter, if I was free of the hauntings? Perhaps even the dreams will stop when everything’s resolved.’
His face became artful. ‘I’m prepared to take the consequences – after all, what’s wrong with being pampered in an asylum for the next few years, because they will say I’m mad, won’t they? I’ll play the same game I think Magda Cribben has played all these years.’

  He straightened and smiled as if pleased with himself. He took a step back and leaned against the landing railing behind him.

  ‘You know I expected your husband to be here tonight,’ he said. ‘I had intended to get his permission to stay overnight to monitor the equipment I was going to set up around the house. When I was sure everyone was asleep I was going to steal Loren away from her bed and take her down to the cellar. When it was done, I was going to leave quietly.’

  ‘They wouldn’t put you in a psychiatric institute,’ Eve said coldly. ‘No, you’ll rot in prison.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I won’t let you take my child!’ Eve shouted at him defiantly but more scared than she had ever been in her life, more scared even than the day Cam went missing, if that were possible (perhaps because then she had hope).

  His reply was so twisted in logic and so affably put that a violent shudder ran through her.

  He said: ‘But, Eve, I only want one of your daughters.’

  That was when she had no doubt at all that this man was seriously crazy, and all the more dangerous: he couldn’t be reasoned with.

  Lightning blazed against the window and thunder cracked almost immediately afterwards, momentarily diverting his attention.

  ‘Run, Loren, run!’ Eve shouted and they both jumped to their feet, Eve pushing at her daughter’s back to hurry her up the stairs.

  But although surprised by their sudden break, Pyke’s reaction was swift. Even before the thunder had rumbled away he had turned his sturdy walking stick upside down so that its curved handle was pointing away from him as he leaned forward. He hooked Eve’s ankle with it and her own impetus brought her crashing down, jarring her chest and one elbow against the edges of the stairs.

  ‘Do you want pain, Eve? Because I can give you pain,’ Pyke bellowed.

  Loren’s scream bounced off the walls, ceiling and flagstoned floor. The girl stopped climbing and reached back for her mother, tugging at her arm to help her rise again.

  ‘Leave me!’ Eve cried at her. ‘Just run, get away!’

  But Loren refused to leave her mother behind. She slipped a hand under Eve’s shoulder and desperately tried to lift her.

  The walking stick descended fast and struck Eve’s back so that she sprawled on the stairs once more.

  She half turned and kicked out, her foot hitting Pyke full in the stomach. He nearly toppled backwards, but somehow managed to regain his balance. Only slightly winded, he raised the heavy stick again.

  Eve pulled herself free of Loren’s clutching hands, turning all the way to defend herself. It was too late, though: the walking stick came down and hit her on the side of her head. She fell back and in a daze she heard Loren’s frightened cry and then another, smaller voice, Cally’s voice, yelling from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Leave my mummy alone!’

  Eve turned onto her stomach and tried to raise herself on hands and knees, but she was struck across the back of her shoulders next and everything went black.

  The ‘vision’ swam back into Lili’s head. She had lost it for a while as her other senses, the normal ones, began to resurface, leading her slowly towards consciousness. There was no choice but to accept the returning images . . .

  The guardian who is called Augustus Cribben, still naked, his pale flesh scored with striped wounds and old scars, is collecting the small corpses that are scattered around the house.

  He carries the children’s bodies to the head of the cellar stairs, then bundles them down, their still warm bodies rolling over and over until there is a lifeless pile of them at the bottom. The roar of coursing water rises from the well and fills the chamber with its sound, for the river below is in tumult.

  Susan Trainer is the last child to be gathered up and this one he drags across the flagstone floor because he has grown tired with all the killing and carrying, and the fiery demons inside his head refuse to give him peace. His mad eyes are bloodshot with the pain.

  Cribben shuffles the corpse onto the top step, then pushes it over with his foot so that it tumbles down to join its companions in death.

  He presses both hands against his temples as if to squeeze out the agony, but there is no relief.

  Shambling to the centre of the hall, he picks up the stick he had left lying there while he completed his body-disposal tasks. He shouts out as he flails his own flesh with it, not as a penance but as a distraction from the fiercer pain inside his skull.

  After a short while, Cribben lumbers to the hall’s broad stairway and climbs to the small landing. Rain gusts against the glass of the tall window with awesome force and the howling wind rattles the wood. He turns round to face the hall, the brutal studded cane held aloft as he stretches out his arms in adoration of Christ. He has discharged his duty.

  He has offered up the souls of the children to his God. And found absolution for his own tortured soul.

  Lili’s ‘vision’ finally faded completely and she stirred on the drenched earth.

  74: THE BRIDGE

  Lightning lit up the house across the river and Gabe, who had been unable to make out the dark building through the heavy sheets of rain, took a moment to absorb the sight of it. Yeah, he thought drily, it even looks like a haunted house, especially on a night like this.

  The lightning stuttered and died, and as thunder shook the skies almost directly overhead, Crickley Hall all but disappeared into the murk once more. There didn’t seem to be any lights on – no, if he looked hard, Gabe could just detect faint glows in some windows. But they were very dim and that wasn’t because of the rain. He wondered if power from the main grid had failed and the house’s generator had kicked in; if the machine wasn’t running at full capacity it might account for the weak lighting.

  Gabe leaned in close to his companion. ‘You okay, Perce?’ He had to shout to be heard over the storm.

  ‘I’m all right, Mr Caleigh,’ Percy yelled back. ‘But I don’t like the look of that river.’

  He was right. They were standing in the roadway, the bridge and river only a few yards away. By the bright but rain-limited beam of Percy’s torch Gabe could see the ferocious white spume that reared and tossed on the roiling water, whose level was almost up to the top of the riverbanks. It didn’t look like the swollen river would be contained for much longer.

  The engineer had noticed the two cars in the short parking bay and he thought he had seen the small two-door Citroën before. The other vehicle, a dark-red Mondeo, he didn’t recognize. Who the hell would be visiting on a night like this?

  Gabe and Percy hadn’t said much to one another as they had battled the storm, but the old gardener’s concern over Crickley Hall had the American worried. The house had survived the previous flood, hadn’t it? So Eve only had to get herself and the girls upstairs and trust in the building’s solid, thick walls to withstand any floodwaters. Although power lines were vulnerable in this kind of weather, Gabe was also concerned that Percy hadn’t been able to reach Eve by phone. He didn’t like the idea of Crickley Hall being totally cut off.

  The gardener directed the torchbeam towards the bridge ahead of them.

  ‘I don’t like the looks of that, either,’ he declared, and Gabe nodded. Nor did he.

  Natural debris – branches, a small tree, shrubbery and no doubt dead animals – was piling up on one side of the bridge, and the structure itself was visibly unsteady, shaking as if about to break free of the concrete bases on both riverbanks. Crossing it was going to be a risk.

  ‘Percy, we gotta get over the bridge right now, before it goes,’ Gabe shouted into the gardener’s hood-covered ear. ‘But, look, maybe you don’t. No point in both of us chancing it.’

  ‘I’ll come along with yer, Mr C
aleigh. We’ll hafta’ be quick though.’

  Gabe didn’t argue: there was no time. Soon the bridge was going to break away under the strain. He clamped his hand around the old man’s upper arm. ‘Let’s go, then!’

  Percy led the way, shining the torch down at the ground before them as they went. Gabe had never felt so wet in all his life: his reefer coat felt twice as heavy as normal and his hair was plastered to his scalp. Although his coat collar was up, rainwater still managed to soak his neck; his jeans were now a darker shade of blue and even the socks beneath his boots felt damp. They plodded over the muddy patch in front of the bridge and paused to make a closer assessment of the wooden structure’s condition.

  Percy stood to one side so that he could examine the thick stanchions supporting the bridge.

  ‘One of ’em uprights has come away,’ he informed the engineer. ‘The whole blamed thing’s gonna tear free afore long, but that were why it were built this way, so’s it don’t act like a dam.’

  ‘That’s helpful, Perce. Shall we get across now?’

  Gabe placed a tentative foot on the sodden slippery boards. The bridge shook under him.

  ‘Got an idea, Perce. Let’s just run for it.’

  Percy clapped him on the back and without another word they raced towards the other side of the bridge.

  They almost made it together, but the surface was too slick with spray and slime. Percy’s feet skidded from under him and he went down with a bone-rattling thud.

  Gabe, who had made it all the way before his companion had fallen, turned back for him and as he reached down to haul Percy to his feet, the whole bridge lurched. The deck tilted and the engineer went down on one knee. Percy began to slide towards the left-hand rail and might have slipped through the struts had not Gabe grabbed him. Unbalanced himself, Gabe managed to clutch the limb of a tree that was poking through the struts on the right-hand rail. It jerked forward a little, then held firm, and Gabe was able to draw Percy towards him using the branch for leverage.