The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

As if to dramatize the announcement, lightning strobed through the window over the stairs and the naked figure on the landing lost substance again, became translucent, nothing more than a vague apparition through which the landing rail and the torchère with its empty vase could be clearly seen. But when the searing light flickered away and thunder filled the air, it took on bulk once more, became a seemingly solid entity.

  Gabe heard Loren give out a little shriek and Eve froze in his arms. Cally gripped his injured shoulder tightly, but the pain did not distract him. Percy took a stumbling step up, moving away from the pale spectre.

  ‘Oh dear God . . .’ Gabe heard Lili say from behind.

  He half rose from the stair he’d been kneeling on, his body tensed as if he might throw himself at the bleeding and scarred phantom below.

  As they watched, the ghost of Cribben raised the cane and whacked it against his own bare leg. Swish-thwack! was the sound it made. Those dark eyes focused on Loren.

  Then Cribben moved forward as if to climb the stairs, eyes never leaving his prey.

  Cally screamed, a frail cry over the storm, and Eve gathered Loren up and began to push her further up the stairs. Eve shivered as she went with her daughter, her head turned as if afraid to let the monster below out of her sight. The wound to her head was forgotten; everything was sharp again, in focus, the dizziness gone. It was all only too real.

  In front of Gabe, Percy stopped climbing and stood his ground: Cribben was not going to get past him. Gabe, too, had resolved not to let the threat pass by; he clenched his fists, even though he wondered what the hell he could do to something that had no real body. Yet it looked so solid, so convincing, that he could not help but assume it had the power to physically harm a person. He swore under his breath.

  But as the darkness above swelled and sank lower, rendering the lights to dim, useless glows, the hall becoming as night, Lili pointed upwards and cried out, ‘Look! Look into it! Can you see them?’

  Gabe glanced up and noticed lighter shadows moving within the murky black fog-like mass, shapeless forms that flitted and weaved in the greater darkness. There were many of them and they conspired to dive down into the thinner lower layers as if to burst through, but they swerved and soared again each time they came close. Until one finally broke away, seeming to use a wispy tendril that dropped from the core as a conduit, and it was quickly followed by another and another, emerging as white shadows that swooped towards the ghost on the stairs.

  They swirled round Cribben as if to harass him, and soon they were joined by more white shadows, whirling round and round so that he appeared cocooned in them. He tried to beat them off with his punishment cane, but they deftly avoided it, then resumed their torment. Cribben’s mouth opened in a defiant roar, his features deranged, but no sound emanated from him. The whirling white shadows began to condense, almost as if they were solidifying, and soon they had shrunk into small, glowing orbs, the lights Gabe had come upon in Cally’s room days go. He tried to count them as they continued to beleaguer Cribben, but they were too fast and mingled too much.

  They swarmed round Cribben like angry bees round a rambler who had disturbed their hive, darting to and fro, touching his phantom skin as though to sting, while he – it – swiped uselessly at them with the cane, silently screaming his annoyance. And then they were gone.

  Gabe gaped. The tiny balls of light had shimmered once, then disappeared, leaving the ghost alone on the small landing. Cribben dropped the cane and brought his gnarled hands up to his temples as if in terrible pain. Did ghosts feel pain? Or was it the memory of pain? Gabe had no idea.

  Lifting up his arms and turning his face towards the ceiling, Cribben stood with his eyes closed and his mouth open wide, the tendons in his neck stretched and visible, as though real, his spine arched in his apparent agony. Fresh blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wounds, weals appearing, opening up and immediately festering, while scars reddened and seemed ready to burst.

  Gabe felt a sudden trembling at his feet. He looked down and the staircase beneath him was shaking. They all became conscious of a deep rumbling and Percy put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. The wall was vibrating. For a few moments they forgot about the vision on the landing below.

  The rumbling grew into a steady roar and the whole building seemed to be shivering, even though its construction was of thick solid stone. Dust drifted down from the ceiling, falling through the thinning fog that had all but concealed the chandelier’s lights. An earthquake, Gabe told himself, and he reached back for Eve’s hand. Cally skipped down a couple of steps and threw her arms round his leg, while Loren buried her face into her mother’s chest. The noise was becoming unbearable, frightening, rising to a crescendo, and the house was shaking as though an invisible force was running through its structure.

  On the square landing Cribben continued to rage.

  With a tremendous crash, the floodwaters smashed through the tall window, sending glass shrapnel slicing into the phantom before it. Gabe toppled backwards onto Eve and Loren with the shock, taking Cally with him, but he saw Cribben engulfed by the deluge and swept away, only his bloody hands appearing above the torrent of water. The ghost was slammed against the opposite wall as if it were human and Gabe thought, if the body had been real, then almost every bone would have been shattered such was the impact.

  It was only Lili who understood that this was how Augustus Cribben had originally died, that this was a replay of his very last moments, and that unless his spirit passed over and ceased to haunt Crickley Hall, he would never rest in peace.

  Still more water poured through the open front door to join with the main body of floodwater and surge around the grand hall, sweeping away furniture, bursting through into other rooms, lapping at the stairs, channelling down the cellar steps and flowing into the well, where it joined forces with the underground river to rage down to the sea bay. Soon, the whole cellar and boiler room next door were completely flooded.

  Gabe groaned when the lights dimmed even more, then failed as the generator below was overwhelmed. Fortunately, Cally was still clinging to his leg and he could feel Eve and Loren’s forms beneath him; he roughly hauled them to their feet.

  Lightning brightened the hall again and he saw the floodwater was rising fast, its turbulent level already washing over the stairs just below where they all cowered.

  ‘Come on!’ he yelled over the roll of thunder. ‘The house is solid, but we gotta get higher. No way of telling how far the flood’s gonna reach, but we should be okay on the top landing. If we have to, we can go all the way up to the dorm.’

  Light dazzled them as Percy switched on the powerful torch that had been tucked away again in a pocket of his storm coat. He turned its beam towards the swelling waters and they saw something bright carried through the doorway to the cellar: it was the spinning top and it quickly disappeared from view, riding the current like a rubber raft.

  Percy yelled at Gabe, pointing the torch in the engineer’s direction: ‘The floodwater will funnel into the well! It shouldn’t rise much more than this!’

  ‘Maybe! But we’ll be safer if we move up! Gabe called back.

  Percy showed the way a head and they began to climb the trembling stairs. Before stepping onto the gallery landing Gabe, with Cally carried in his right arm, snatched a quick look over the stair rail into the hall. There wasn’t a lot to see in the darkness, but he noticed that the tiny lambent orbs were back.

  They skimmed above the surface of the rough swirling water like excited fireflies, exuberant with energy.

  He counted nine of them.

  80: SATURDAY

  The river was unbelievably calm that morning, fast flowing still, but no longer swollen or threatening. The air smelt strongly of damp earth, and natural debris lay scattered everywhere: shrubbery, bushes, leaves, twigs and tree branches, even stones and sizeable rocks. Here and there, and particularly on the lower slopes of the gorge, whole trees had been uprooted. Two yellow Sea King rescu
e helicopters passed low over Crickley Hall, heading towards the bay, the sky above them a near-perfect blue with only a few puffball clouds floating in its expanse. A wide pre-constructed metal bridge spanned the river in place of the wooden bridge that had been swept away. Various vehicles, including an olive-green military lorry and two police cars, one unmarked, cluttered the nearby lane. (Pyke’s Mondeo and Lili Peel’s Citroën had been carried off down the hill by floodwater some time during the night and were now floating in the bay along with other wrecks and overturned fishing boats.) Parked on Crickley Hall’s muddy front lawn were an ambulance with its rear doors open, a police van and a Land Rover 90.

  Loren and Cally were glad to be outside in the sunshine and had watched the comings and goings of policemen and various rescue team personnel with interest. The most exciting were the police divers, but the girls had not been allowed to follow them into the house. If their mood was a little subdued it was because Cam’s death had been confirmed and only partly due to the dramatic events of last night, which so far seemed to have had no harmful effect on either of them (nevertheless, Loren, in particular, would be closely watched over the next few weeks for any delayed reaction to the ordeal she had been put through). They had managed to catch some sleep, at first in their parents’ arms on the landing overlooking the flooded hall, then later in their own beds while Gabe and Eve kept guard outside their room with Lili and Percy.

  A group of men, Gabe Caleigh among them, had gathered by the big oak tree where a broken swing hung forlornly from a branch, one end of the seat resting on the damp grass, its rusty severed chain curled on the ground like an iron snake.

  Gabe was speaking to the yellow-jacketed man on his left, the deputy chief of the emergency services, Tom Halliway. ‘Thanks for all the attention. I’m sure you gotta lot to do in the village.’

  ‘Not as much as we expected,’ Halliway replied. ‘Hollow Bay got off comparatively lightly because of the flood precautions taken over the years. Plenty of cars swept away and overturned, several properties seriously damaged, but overall there’s been no great harm done to the village. The main thing is, there’s been no loss of life as far as we can tell. Sorry, didn’t mean to disregard your friend.’

  ‘Pyke? No, he wasn’t a friend. Barely knew him. He turned up two days ago calling himself a psychic investigator, looking for ghosts.’

  The uniformed policeman to his right, Chief Superintendent Derek Pargeter, remarked: ‘Because he’d seen the article in the Dispatch this week, you told me earlier.’

  ‘Uh-huh. The guy had read the crazy story about Crickley Hall being haunted, said he wanted to disprove it – or prove it, I’m not sure which now. So we let him go ahead with his investigation.’

  ‘Last night.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yeah. Last night. He was setting up his equipment when the flood hit. Poor guy never stood a chance. He was swept down into the cellar.’

  The thin-faced policeman nodded gravely. ‘Poor man. Wouldn’t have stood a chance because of the well there.’ He jerked his head towards the house. ‘The divers should have completed their search by now, but I doubt they’ve had any luck in finding the body; it would have been carried out to the bay by the underground river – the force would have been incredible. The coastguard and sea rescue helicopters will keep a look out for Mr Pyke’s body, but the currents along this coast can be unpredictable.’

  Gabe looked down at the ground and said nothing. He and his family, with Lili Peel and Percy Judd, had spent the night huddled together on the landing, ready to move to the upper floor should the water rise to a threatening level. Once Loren and Cally had fallen asleep and been put into their beds, the group had discussed everything that had happened in the past week as well as the whole story of the evacuees and their horrific deaths. Lili had spoken of the vision or ‘insight’ she’d had while lying semi-conscious on the lawn after having been hit by the windblown swing – if it had been windblown, that is – and Eve had wept at the children’s fate. But they all agreed that the true story of all that had gone on should be kept to themselves. Who would believe the truth anyway? As far as anyone else was concerned, Gordon Pyke had been unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It was Gabe who had put the question: ‘Who could’ve guessed the authorities had hushed up the real causes of the evacuees’ deaths all those years ago?’ The question rhetorical, he had gone on: ‘As Percy told Eve the other day, the lid was kept on it because if the fact was ever known that the kids’ bodies had strangulation bruisings round their throats, a couple of them with broken necks, then no caring parent would ever let their child be evacuated. Then, was it in the public interest to know in time of war? What about the morale of the country? Y’know, all that stuff. Besides, their only suspect was already dead – he’d paid for his crimes, so no point in dragging it all out into the open. The cane strokes and scars on Cribben’s naked body – ignoring the fresh cuts from flying glass – must’ve got the authorities and police thinking something was not quite right about the guy. The only possible witness they had – maybe she was a suspect too, at first – was Cribben’s sister, Magda, and she wasn’t saying anything any more.

  ‘I guess the vicar at the time – Rossbridger? – knew the truth of it, because he had Cribben’s body buried in a neglected part of the graveyard and well away from the evacuees’ graves. Rossbridger would’ve kept the secret outa self-interest – it might’ve damaged his reputation.’

  Gabe’s surmise had given them all something to think about during the hellish long night.

  Halliway interrupted Gabe’s thoughts. ‘Not much more we can do here, Mr Caleigh. The last of the flood water has been pumped from the cellar – most of it had already drained into the well anyway.’

  Thanks for what you’ve done,’ Gabe said gratefully, shaking Halliway’s hand.

  The stocky deputy chief merely nodded and walked to his mud-caked Land Rover, where he was joined by two other members of his team. Before climbing in, he turned and called back to Gabe.

  ‘Your vehicle’s more or less where you left it last night. We just moved it to the side of the road when we cleared the fallen tree. Good thing you left the keys in the ignition.’

  ‘Right. I’ll go get it later. We’re moving out today.’

  As the Land Rover backed across the bridge, a policeman in wet Wellington boots came hurrying out of the house. Gabe hadn’t noticed him before but he now recognized PC Kenrick, who had called on them earlier in the week after the two local kids had got a fright in Crickley Hall.

  The policeman went straight up to the chief superintendent.

  ‘The divers have brought up two bodies, sir,’ he said breathlessly.

  ‘What? Two?’

  ‘Sir. And neither one was an adult male.’

  Gabe looked at Kenrick in surprise.

  ‘One is a small boy,’ the young policeman went on, ‘and the other is what’s left of a woman – they could tell it was a woman by the hair. The paramedics will be bringing out the bodies in a moment.’

  ‘In bodybags, I hope,’ said his superior officer. ‘What condition are the bodies in? I presume they’ve been down there for a long time unless you, Mr Caleigh, haven’t been entirely frank with me and more than one person lost their life last night.’

  He eyed Gabe suspiciously.

  ‘No, just Pyke. Those other bodies have been there a long time,’ said Gabe. ‘Since 1943, I guess you’ll find. I think they’re what’s left of a young boy and a female teacher who disappeared back then.’

  ‘Good Lord. You’re serious?’

  The engineer nodded. ‘They both went missing around that time.’

  ‘No, that can’t be right, sir.’ Kenrick was addressing his superior. The woman maybe – apparently she was caught up in a niche in the rocks of the riverbed and she’d rotted. She’s almost a skeleton.’

  So, Gabe thought, Nancy Linnet revealed herself to Pyke – and himself, of course – in
what was probably the worst stage of her decomposition. She meant to terrify her murderer.

  ‘And the boy?’ Pargeter asked the constable, irritated that he had to prompt. ‘What’s the condition of the boy’s corpse, Kenrick?’

  ‘That’s just it, sir. The boy. He’s hardly been touched. His body hasn’t rotted at all.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, man, there has to be some decomposition or bloating even if the body has only been there a short time.’

  ‘His skin is like pure-white marble. Oh, and so is his hair. Totally white. He’s only wearing a jumper and one sock, and they’re stiff, like rotted cardboard, colours almost washed out of them by the water, which suggests the body has been down there a long time. But the paramedics don’t think he drowned: they’re saying he might have bled to death.’

  The chief superintendent was astounded. Gabe was thoughtful.

  The young policeman continued: ‘The boy had been mutilated, sir. Around the genital area. It looks like an injury that was never treated. The divers found him on a small shelf, almost a fissure in the rockface. He was wedged inside it above the water level. Even over the past few days when the river’s been swollen and fast flowing, it still wasn’t able to dislodge the body.’

  He stopped to draw in a breath.

  ‘The divers say it’s like an icebox down there and it’s almost as if the body was hermetically sealed, that’s the only way they can explain it.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not just in a state of rigor mortis?’

  ‘No, sir, this is different.’

  ‘But that means the body would have had to be insulated.’

  ‘I know, sir. That’s what they reckon. Like I said, the boy’s corpse resembles white marble, too hard even for rigor mortis. The flesh can’t even be squeezed. It’s like a statue. It’s unnatural, sir.’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ agreed the chief superintendent. He scratched the morning stubble under his jaw; it had already been a long day and it wasn’t noon yet. ‘The pathologist might be able to throw some light on it. And there’s no sign of this man, this Gordon Pyke?’