by Neil Spring
Stranded there on a ladder in a dank cellar, this outcome didn’t strike me as particularly likely – but it had to be possible, didn’t it?
As if in answer to this question, there came then a small voice from below. Hopeful. Afraid.
‘Mummy?’
I looked down, but I could see nothing but musty darkness.
‘Is that you, Mummy?’
My heart clenched, for this was unmistakably a child’s voice. And although I knew the idea was outrageous and impossible – not least because my son would be with a new family, far away from here – the distressing thought came suddenly into my mind that this was my boy. Speaking to me.
Still gripping the iron ladder, I began to tremble as I remembered my baby’s beautiful, smooth face. I saw him now, swaddled in blankets, cradled in the arms of the nun as she took him away.
Your son. Your own son.
‘Mummy? Maman?’
That word, that beautiful word, jerked me out of the past, into cold, terrible reality. Maman. French for Mother.
I started down into the implacable blackness.
No sooner were my feet on the ground than one of them collided with the torch. I snatched it up, flicked it on and pivoted. The beam fixed on a pale and tiny hand.
I jumped, startled. Then a waxy face with frightened eyes loomed towards me.
‘You’re not my maman.’
The boy from the crossroads, the same boy from the séance, stood before me.
Pierre!
How my heart ached for this poor child. He was naked from the waist up, his arms like wasted sticks, his ribs painfully protruding. No wonder his eyes looked so hollow, his cheeks so gaunt. He was dangerously underweight and smelt sourly of body odour, his whole demeanour one of ragged exhaustion.
I was struck by a wave of crashing anger as I saw something else on his wasted arms: they were mottled with fresh bruises.
Any fears I had previously harboured of him, or of vengeful spirits, fell away. Now, peering into that vulnerable face, I felt nothing but the maternal, protective impulse to rescue him, to understand how he had come to be here.
And to punish the monster responsible.
With mounting nerves, I shone my torch around our grim surroundings, remembering Albert’s dented face, imagining him looming out of the shadows, grasping for me. What if he was down here now, with us?
There was a miserable mattress on the ground; a plate, a rusty knife and fork.
We were standing in a large domed chamber. The walls were made of bricks so old they had cracked in places and blackened with age. The floor, also of brick, was thickly covered with dust that smelt ancient; and there was another odour pervading the air, a horrible odour. The same noxious whiff from before.
My pulse quickened as I kneeled and put one reassuring hand on Pierre’s frail shoulder.
‘My name is Sarah, Pierre. I’m here to help you.’
He blinked at me through blurred eyes. ‘Where’s my mummy?’
I wanted to say his mother was worrying about him, that she was waiting for him at home in Wiltshire. But of course she was not. She had become a tragedy of the lost village, a suicide victim who was destined now to be buried in a cold, dark spot in unsanctified ground, far away from living sight.
‘It’s all right, Pierre, you’ll be safe now.’ Because I’m going to get you out of here, I almost added, but didn’t. Because then I saw the rope knotted around his ankle, and when I followed the rope with the torchlight, I saw it was fastened tightly to an iron rung embedded in the curved wall.
I had to restrain myself from cursing out loud the brute who had done this as I stole another panicky glance around the darkened cellar. Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought I had just seen something move in the hopping beam of my torchlight.
I directed the light at the opposite side of the chamber and saw there was an opening, an alcove receding into the blackest darkness.
My heart began thudding even harder.
For pity’s sake, hurry. If Albert should find you here now . . .
‘Let’s get this off you,’ I said to Pierre, shakily putting down the torch and reaching for the knot. ‘Quickly, tell me, who did this? Was it a man, Pierre? A man called Albert?’
Silence. And then a distinctly disquieting sound: heavy footsteps, dragging towards us.
Groping for my torch, I clicked it off.
Crouched down next to Pierre, I whispered, ‘Do you know what’s happening?’ For although the footsteps had ceased momentarily, I could still sense movement in the darkness, on the opposite side of the chamber. And something else: burning.
The boy uttered just one word: ‘Phantasma . . .’
And before I could ask what that meant, he began coughing and covered his mouth. My eyes began to water and I saw, with a jolt of alarm, an eerie luminescence glowing softly in the dark. The glowing light was emanating from the opposite side of the chamber, and becoming steadily brighter.
A thin smoke – more of a fog, actually – was slipping slowly into the chamber, and the foul chemical smell was suddenly much stronger. Pungent. My head felt light. And then, as I was slipping my hand into Pierre’s, a bolt of fear smacked through me.
There were things silhouetted in the drifts of smoke. Shapes with wispy edges, translucent, shimmering with light.
And the shapes were moving.
‘Pierre,’ I whispered, ‘what is it? What’s happening?’
I was pulling the boy close to me, thinking desperately, when he brought his hands up to cover his eyes.
He can see the shapes too.
What’s happening?
I was dizzy, too dizzy to stand, and I couldn’t stop staring into that unearthly light. The threads of reality began to untether for me right then. And for a split second, as if I had been wrenched out of my body with a burst of light, I was somewhere else.
I was waiting, watching the turning of a mill wheel. Imber’s abandoned mill, but not abandoned. This was the mill in its glory days, when the days were long and children chased rabbits out of the cornfield. How old was I? The sun was warm on my neck. In the distance, sheep were bleating.
I waited, watching the trees sway, watching the shadows lengthen, until suddenly a figure appeared.
Wait! What are you doing?
He grabbed me roughly around my wrist, and I—
I tried to cry out but no words came, only hacking coughs, my vision twisting, distorting. The smoke and the light were opening a shimmering window to another time.
Astounded, I looked into the past, a scene wrapped in a ghostly fog, and I saw a story unfold before me.
A freezing winter morning in a village miles from anywhere. October 1914. I’ve seen this before. There is the schoolhouse, the manor, the cottages; there, the low wall made of mud and rubble.
Above, on a hill littered with graves, is the church. In the distance, on the downs high above the village, farmers work the land.
It’s snowing, and in the church tower the bells are ringing slowly. Mournfully.
The day of the funeral.
I turn to my side and see him. My father. He removes his hat respectfully, watching the approaching funeral car. Two women at the side of the street are nodding, staring. Afraid.
I turn and follow their gaze to the churchyard gate, where the grieving family stands. The mother is sobbing, shoulders shaking. She’s much younger now, but with a plunge of my stomach I recognise her as Marie Hartwell.
She’s aware of the villagers watching her, but dares not look up. She knows what they are thinking. How can it be? How can yet another Hartwell child be dead? The man next to her – thin, handsome, stony-faced – wears a towering black hat. It is unmistakably Oscar Hartwell.
Marie gives him a look of pure hatred.
He responds with a dark glare, th
e sort of look that warns, ‘Keep your filthy mouth shut.’
I watch as—
I was back, abruptly, in the smoky haze of that underground chamber, crouching down on the ground with the boy. From the billowing smoke came a low hissing sound.
Pierre was trembling, squinting, not at me but into the smoke. At something awful.
‘Phantasma,’ Pierre said again, his hand trembling as he pointed.
I wish I hadn’t looked.
Something awful was in the chamber with us. An evil presence. An apparition so abysmal and so shocking that all I could do was shake my head helplessly in a drowsy terror. Never in my life had I expected to see something so monstrous.
Materialising in the smoke, just ten paces away from me, was the ambiguous shape of an animal with matted brown fur. It took me a few long seconds to realise what it was, and when I did, my chest hitched with raw terror.
I was staring at the grotesque, rotting head of a wild boar.
I almost screamed then, as my hands began to shake violently. The boar’s black eyes, sentient, baleful, fixed on me. Its razor-sharp tusks were bared, and it seemed – God help me – to be drifting through the wispy smoke, getting nearer with each second. An acute stench of wet, rotten fur was close, so vile that I wanted to vomit.
Pierre and I scrambled backwards until we reached the wall, terrified.
Courage failed me. I began gasping for breath and my eyes popped open in horror as a new apparition infested the chamber: a human skull with a rat crawling from one hollow eye socket.
I drew back, crouched there on the filthy ground, absolutely appalled.
‘Enough,’ I cried. ‘Please, no more!’
But I realised, with a chill of horror, that there were more dark and fantastical forms sliding in around us, a kaleidoscope of hideous and unearthly spectres, writhing in the mist: a swooping winged creature; a ram with giant horns; a jackal. It snarled and Pierre wailed in fright.
Beside myself with fear, I yelled for help, wrapped my arms around Pierre’s shuddering body.
What’s happening? Why can’t I think clearly?
The smoke billowed, the phantoms swirled, malevolent and irretrievably evil. Now, a new one surged forward, a translucent woman in flowing black garments.
A nun, her face drawn, her fingers and toes blackened. Her eyes blazing, fixed on me.
I shrieked and pulled Pierre closer, trying to shield him from this unearthly creature. The rope around his ankle strained.
The nun reached out for me with wasted arms. There was nowhere to run now, no chance of escape.
No hope.
– 29 –
DEVIL’S SNARE
Ripping my gaze away from the terrible spectre in black robes, I saw that Pierre’s mouth was agape; I could feel his skinny frame trembling with terror.
Then a man’s voice, low, almost threatening: ‘Here you are.’
Whirling round, I was horrified to see, between us and the iron ladder, the dark figure of a man so shrouded in the thin smoke he could have been made of it. He was holding something. I strained to see . . .
Oh Jesus, oh God.
A blacksmith’s hammer.
I felt a seething black fear then, the utmost despair.
‘Please, wait, whoever you are, just—’
The bulking figure came flying towards us and swung the hammer.
I gasped as it whistled past my face. A piercing crack echoed all around. I looked up at the nun in front of me, but she had changed.
What? What?
The nun’s face was now a spider’s web – a crazy pattern of lines. And I realised: I was staring into a cracked mirror.
Suddenly, the mirror exploded outwards, showering the floor with shattered fragments.
I fell back into the legs of the man standing over me, hands curling at his side. Those hands, that hooked nose, the sweep of the forehead . . . My whole body sagged with exhausted relief.
Harry!
It was his voice I had heard. He who had swung the hammer. He must have retrieved it on his way down here.
‘Wait here, Sarah.’ His black frock coat flapped out behind him as he strode into the smoke and the glowing light and the few ghastly shapes still flickering around the cellar. He shouted – so loudly, so powerfully – ‘Albert Sidewinder, enough. SHOW YOURSELF!’
The flickering light blinked out. Every last lurid spectre melted into the whirling smoke. Groggy, Pierre and I were left crouching in the gloom, surrounded by glittering shards of glass. Shaking off the dizziness, I groped for my torch and drew the boy close, afraid he had been caught by flying glass, but he seemed all right, just frightened and shivering.
Limbs trembling, my breath laboured, I shone my torch around, splashing Price in a sickly light as he re-emerged from an alcove on the opposite side of the chamber.
Wait. Not just Price.
He was dragging a hunched figure with him, hauling him to his feet.
‘Is this who you came looking for, Sarah?’
I rubbed my eyes. Recognised the dented face. The left eye like a dusty marble. I nodded. Yes, this was the projectionist, Albert – Warden Sidewinder’s estranged son. When he saw me, his eyes bulged with surprise and fear.
At that moment, Harry Price’s face was burning with anger, the scariest thing in the room. With a roar of magnificent fury, he slammed Albert back into chamber wall, one hand clasped around the projectionist’s throat.
‘A trick! Clever and sophisticated, but a trick nonetheless. Ghosts and gadgets, yes?’ Albert was shaking his head, not looking at Price, who called out to me, ‘See that, Sarah? In the alcove?’
I shone my torch that way again, the dusty beam illuminating something on the floor: a small, antique-looking projector, fashioned from mahogany and brass and decorated with a crucifix and a skull with wings.
‘A magic lantern,’ Price declared. ‘There’s an oil lamp back there too. Grab it!’
I did, fumbling with the small oil lamp until the room flickered with an orange glow. I set it down on the ground near the ladder. All the time, the projectionist was against the wall, unsuccessfully struggling against Price’s grip.
‘Thought you’d dabble with the phantasmagoria, did you? Projecting lurid images onto smoke and glass? An antiquated conjuring trick. Using drugs to heighten the illusion, to induce visions! Is that what you and your father did to us at the mill, in Imber? I’m willing to bet so. That’s why we all felt so drowsy. What did you use, eh?’ He tightened his grip around Albert’s throat, sniffing the air. ‘Nitric acid mixed with sulphuric acid for the smoke, and what else? Something intense and short-lived, I suppose. Something to create altered perceptions of the self. What was it, mescaline?’
Albert struggled some more, straining.
‘Tell me!’
Albert’s eyes moved quickly from side to side. ‘Devil’s Snare,’ he admitted finally.
Price’s eyes widened. ‘Datura stramonium?’
‘Harry, will it harm us?’ I asked, glancing at Pierre. The boy looked like I felt: distraught and afraid and dazed.
‘Nasty side effects,’ said Price, moving his full attention back to Albert. ‘Anxiety, racing heart, dizziness, headache. Feel any of that, Sarah?’
I nodded.
‘You’ll feel disorientated for a time, with blurred vision and a dry mouth,’ Price replied. ‘The plant will be behind the lantern. Lots of it, I should think. Sarah, go and get it.’
Without waiting to ask why, I did as he instructed, filling my pockets with the small paper packets that Albert had stored back there, and then returned, groggily, to the chamber.
He didn’t tell me so at the time, but when I later looked up datura stramonium I discovered that inhaling it in high doses could prove fatal.
‘An extremely potent hallucinogenic,’ he
added. ‘Even smelling the flowers of datura stramonium can induce the richest visual hallucinations. Commonly found in Britain in cultivated ground – roadsides, fields, forest edges . . .’
A memory caught: tall plants with pale yellow-green stems and white, trumpet-shaped flowers with flashes of purple within. I had seen them outside the Imber mill. So close to where the séances were conducted. Where I had felt disorientated, overcome with harrowing visions. I told Price immediately and saw his interest heighten.
‘I see. Is that why you chose Imber’s mill for the séances?’ he asked Albert, who, still struggling against the wall, muttered something unintelligible. ‘Sorry, what’s that? Speak up!’
Albert looked at Price directly, his face contorted with inner torment. ‘The drug allows me to channel the dead.’
‘Of course it does, silly me. You’re the “ghost maker”!’ Price shook his head. ‘We’ve met your father, Albert. We know all about your experiments, how you lost control.’
‘No, no. The lantern slides, the lantern itself – they enable me to converse with old souls. That’s what my father could never understand. The drugs enhance my—’
‘No, they do NOT!’ Price bellowed, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Your drugs induce aural and visual hallucinations. Violent ones. Whatever your father has told you, you’re not capable of raising ghosts. No matter how eerily convincing they are, séance tricks and light projections do not bestow upon you necromantic abilities. Just as egg white and cheese cloth does not pass for ectoplasm under the eye of a powerful microscope!’ Price glanced at me. ‘Now, I don’t yet know why, but you have colluded with your father to manufacture deceptions that have driven innocent men – including yourself, it seems – to madness. And now you must answer for your crimes.’
His patience extinguished, Price threw Albert forcefully to the floor, where he landed in a heap.
‘Question time! Why go to all this trouble for us? All this smoke and mirrors?’
Albert struggled to speak, his voice still dazed from the drugs. ‘I’m – I’m protecting myself.’
