The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  ‘What nonsense is this?’ spat Foyster. ‘What are you saying? That my wife is … ?’

  Price was emphatic. ‘The church register records the bond as having been made on the sixteenth of October 1914. She’s still married, aren’t you, Mrs Foyster?’

  The rector reached out to his wife. ‘Marianne … is this true? Tell me it’s not.’

  But her cries drowned out his words.

  ‘Mr Price, you are a liar!’ she screamed. ‘You believe more than you’re letting on.’

  ‘The woman’s hysterical,’ Price announced, stepping back from Marianne’s accusation. ‘This house is too stressful for her – she’s overwrought. She slips easily into states where she is unconscious and apparently remembers nothing. Then she writes all over the walls, puts pebbles under your pillow, turns herself out of bed, hides your books and papers, throws stones, drinks your coffee, disturbs your study. She creates illusions, sir, and she calls them facts!’1

  ‘Why, Marianne? Why would you do such a thing?’ the rector cried, moving towards her with the wariness of one approaching a rabid dog.

  ‘Because she hates it here,’ Price snarled. He looked across at me. ‘Come, Sarah, we must be off.’

  As we made for the doorway I thought of Mrs Foyster, with cunning intent and to indulge her need for excitement, cruelly deceiving her family and friends, destroying their property and risking their health with booby traps, broken glass, hammers and stones. And what of her husband, poor, pathetic Lionel Foyster, who said so little but concealed so much? What would become of him? His health would decline and he would increasingly come to rely on his troubled wife. What would she do to him? How far would she go? The thought made me shiver, and as I did so I looked up and saw that she was watching me from the shadows, grinning, her face streaming with tears.

  Mad, I thought. She’s completely mad!

  ‘You can see it all, can’t you, little Miss Goody Two-Shoes,’ she mocked. ‘You think you’re so clever, so perfectly proper!’

  ‘Marianne, be quiet!’ cried her husband.

  But Mrs Foyster was ignoring him, advancing slowly towards me. She was wild, fiery-eyed with a mass of tangled hair, and she spoke with the coldest conviction, her words landing on me like blows. ‘Do you really believe I am the only liar in this room?’ she said menacingly. ‘You have the gall to think that, after all you’ve kept hidden from him?’ She pointed at Price, who saw the gesture but ignored it.

  Please don’t tell him, I begged silently.

  ‘Why not? How dare you, Sarah!’ I felt the force of her words in a second, mysterious pulse of air. ‘How dare you!’

  I knew then that she was reading my mind. I suppose I had known it from the moment she had described my first tentative visit to the Laboratory in Queensberry Place on the night when it all began. You, Sarah. I see you. A long time ago. Walking. It’s cold and black, and you’re walking somewhere with your mother. You should have turned back … But only now did I acknowledge that this woman was in command of a genuine psychic ability. Oh, she had deceived her husband, I did not doubt that. But I was equally certain that some latent power stirred within her. And I was deeply afraid that now, on this dismal night, she would disclose to Price the secret I had so carefully concealed from him all these years.

  Marianne Foyster opened her mouth to speak and I held my breath.

  ‘You asked me what I see when I close my eyes, Sarah – the visions that come to me across the darkness. I see Her. Always Her. And She is coming for you, Sarah, for both of you. After the losses you will suffer, after the fire, after the proof that will be found, the Dark Woman will return.’

  * * *

  Note

  1 Suspicions that the old rector was fooled by his wife are reinforced by W. H. Salter. He recorded visiting Lionel Foyster: ‘I reminded him that a mutual friend, who had seen the wall writings, had pronounced them, and all the other queer happenings, as his wife’s work. He said that was all nonsense. Asked to describe one of the recent occurrences, he said a dreadful thing had happened only the last weekend. His sermon, which he had left on the study table on Saturday night, had disappeared when he went to pick it up on Sunday morning. He spoke of this as if it were obviously the work of the powers of evil, a view I was unable to accept. He seemed to me to have little worldly wisdom and to be entirely dominated by his wife’ (The Haunted Rectory).

  – 25 –

  ‘TOGETHER WE WILL UNCOVER THE TRUTH’

  My relationship with Price was never really the same after that.

  I could not have known that my employment at the Laboratory would soon be at an end, or that we were about to be parted for five long and difficult years. But there were signs of the change that was coming. And as I look back over this manuscript, turning the pages across the years, I can see them all – the lost moments and the choices that led us there.

  We returned to London immediately, and although I was glad to re-enter the sanctuary of my home, I could not shake from my mind the memories of what had happened. I slept fitfully, dark dreams of the phantom nun swirling about me. Marianne Foyster’s prophetic words, which Price had dismissed as melodramatic ramblings, had stirred emotions that I had tried to suppress: guilt and shame, but most of all anger at myself for giving so much to a man who had given so little back to me.

  Mother was more remote than ever. She rose early to fetch the post, as though it were an urgent task. Occasionally she came down to the drawing room in the evening and sat, listening in silence to the gramophone, but mostly she stayed upstairs in her bedroom with the door shut.

  It was naive of me not to question any of this at the time, but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have my own distractions. Even if I had wanted to investigate, my attemps would have been prevented by her locked bedroom door. I sensed that it wasn’t just me she was shutting out, it was the life without answers to questions she wasn’t prepared to share or explain to me. I had given up asking about my father, about the mysterious visitor who had come to the house and poured questions and faith and renewed mourning into mother’s head. She would tell me in her own good time.

  The weekend passed in a blur, and on Sunday night I lay awake in bed, turning over dark thoughts. The idea of returning to the Laboratory, knowing that Price’s attitude towards the case was so different from mine, for reasons I could not explain to him, filled me with creeping nervousness. The thought compelled me to reach for my lamp and, by its light, to retrieve my Holy Bible. But when I opened the drawer next to my bed I froze.

  In the centre of the drawer, next to my Bible, lay a brass medallion bearing the figure of St Ignatius. I recognised it immediately, my mind rushing back in time five years to the Blue Room at Borley Rectory. But how it had come to be here, in the drawer next to my bed? I had no recollection of it having been there before, though when I tried to recall where I had stored the medallion, the memory refused to come. I hesitated before removing it from the drawer. It felt cold in my hand, and I shuddered. I hated to look at the thing. It was just an old brass medallion, I told myself, trying to ignore the malice it seemed to whisper.

  Without delay, I threw the relic of Borley back into the drawer and slammed it shut.

  And, from the partition wall that divided Mother’s bedroom from mine, new and peculiar sounds made themselves heard.

  Tap-tap, scratch; tap-tap, scratch …

  The noises were muffled, barely audible, but definitely real.

  Probably mice, I thought.

  Or rats.

  *

  In the months that followed I became increasingly worried about Price’s behaviour. I knew he had still not returned Reverend Foyster’s Diary of Occurrences, but was at a loss to explain why. If the haunting was – as Price now believed – nothing but a shambling forgery perpetrated by Marianne Foyster, then why did he insist on clinging to the rector’s recollections of the events in the house? It made no sense to me, and whenever I queried him about it he would quickly change the subject. It
was insulting to be dismissed so easily, and humiliating to think that I ever tolerated such behaviour. I had lied to the rector so Price could keep hold of the diary; surely I had a right to know why? But Price never ever acknowledged he was keeping the diary. Nor did he announce to the newspapers – as he would normally do – his triumph in exposing yet another hoax, which was odd given his usual relish for such tasks.

  He did, however, reach out to every psychical investigator who had expressed an interest in the case, informing them that the matter was now finally resolved. I hated assisting him with that task, for his was not a view I could agree with. He wrote to Dr D.F. Frazer-Harris:

  It is the most amazing case, but amazing only in so far that we were convinced that the many phenomena that we saw were fraudulent because we took steps to control various persons and rooms, [and] the manifestations ceased. We think that the rector’s wife is responsible for the trouble, though it is possible that her actions may be the result of hysteria. Of course we did not wire you because although psychologically the case is of great value, psychically speaking there is nothing in it.1

  ‘What is the matter?’ he asked, seeing my dissatisfied reaction to the letter. I shook my head, knowing any attempt to explain my contrary opinion would prove fruitless, and instead I asked what he was going to do next.

  ‘You mean we,’ he replied earnestly. ‘What are we going to do next?’ He was fired up with energy, dashing from one room to the next as he consulted this book and that, delving restlessly into dusty cupboards and trunks for equipment.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, taking a deep reassuring breath, ‘I mean we. So, what next?’

  When he had found what he was looking for, he raised his eyes and fixed them upon me. ‘This!’ he cried triumphantly, brandishing a camera. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten that we were to be visited soon by the great Rudi Schneider?’

  *

  Later that day, Price reminded me that the medium would require a personal item belonging to my dead father. ‘Schneider says that a personal object will help your father’s spirit connect with this world.’

  His request seemed heartfelt. His tone was tender and gentle, but made me wonder: if he was so good, why did I catch myself thinking, every day, about giving up this peculiar life at his side? It seemed so contradictory that I began to worry if there was something wrong with me.

  ‘If it isn’t too difficult, Sarah, do you think you can locate such an item?’

  I thought possibly that I could.

  At home later that evening, I crept upstairs whilst Mother sat reading in the drawing room. Her bedroom door was unlocked and slightly ajar. From within, a peculiar, musty smell caught my curiosity. Inside, dirty clothes were strewn across the floor. I was surprised, Mother was normally so tidy.

  Something else caught my eye: in the far corner, next to the bed, the source of the odour: a pile of damp towels. Next to them, a bucket, filled up with water; and a sponge.

  What on earth was she doing in here? No wonder I suspected we had mice in the walls. This room didn’t look as though it had been cleaned in weeks!

  As the seconds ticked by, my thoughts returned to the task at hand. At the back of my mind I was already telling myself that soon I would need to tell Mother about Schneider’s imminent arrival, and about Price’s abrupt change in attitude towards the supernatural. She needed to hear my doubts.

  I knew she kept my father’s old handkerchief in a drawer next to her bed. But that was too easy somehow. My eye was drawn to the huge oak wardrobe that she would open in the dead of night and rummage in. I stepped towards it.

  ‘Come away from there, Sarah.’

  I spun round: it was Mother, standing behind me at the entrance to her bedroom, looking down upon the heavy brown trunk I had pulled out from the back of the wardrobe.

  ‘I was looking for some bedding,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Well you won’t find it in there.’ She advanced, coming round beside me to see if I had opened the trunk. ‘What’s inside it?’ I opened my mouth to ask, but an inward uncertainty, a fear of not wanting the answer, held my tongue. Instead, my thoughts turned to the bucket on the floor, beneath the window. ‘Why is that in here?’ I asked.

  Mother’s face was surprised and somehow muddled. ‘There was damp coming in, under the window,’ she replied, hesitantly, before a quick blink restored clarity in her expression. ‘I wiped it down.’

  I had to tell her. It was now or never. ‘Come with me downstairs, to the drawing room,’ I said softly. ‘We need to talk.’

  As we sat by the fire I explained my concerns about Price’s inconsistent behaviour, and his gradual conversion to belief in Mr Schneider. I thought she would say “I told you so.” Instead, a smile touched her lips. ‘I see now that perhaps I was too harsh on Mr Price.’

  ‘Too harsh?’

  She nodded ‘This job has been good for you. It’s stable, reliable.’ An idea struck her. ‘You’re not going to tell me you’re giving it all up now, are you? After all your hard work?’

  ‘You want me to stay?’

  ‘You’ve travelled to new places, seen things I never will. For all his complexities, I think Mr Price – Harry – is a good man.’ He has taken care of you; of both of us.’

  She saw my questioning expression and said, ‘When you went away to Yorkshire, Harry was good enough to stay in touch with me. He wrote me letters, to check I was all right.’

  ‘Harry did that?’

  ‘Yes dear,’ she smiled. ‘Oh, I know he has made mistakes, shamed and disgraced legions of mediums, some of them my friends. But I see, also, that he was trying to help. Perhaps he recognises a true gift in Mr Schneider, an opportunity to end the infuriating war between Spiritualists and scientists.’

  I couldn’t speak: I had still to reveal the full story. And my part in it.

  Mother was studying me; and I recognised at that instant, beneath her faded elegance, all the reason and wisdom that had been so evident when I was younger that had distinguished her as sensible, that had inspired me to become like her: smart and confident.

  ‘Tell me this,’ she asked, watching me carefully. ‘Do you trust him?’

  I remembered the warnings from my anonymous telephone caller: Ask him where he goes.

  ‘He’s a loner, Mother. Sometimes I feel as if I am in the way. Sometimes I feel as if I am the centre of his world.’

  ‘But has he ever let you down, Sarah?’

  Still I remained silent, unable to tell her what I held in my heart. There was no telling what the truth would do to her.

  ‘Sarah, if someone as sceptical as Mr Price believes in this man, truly believes in him, so that he is willing to stake his own good word on the matter … well now, that surely has to count for something does it not?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She gave my hand a gentle squeeze. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart? You look pale.’

  When I told her about the planned experiment with Schneider, Mother seemed to melt before me. She let out a sharp gasp as her hand shot to her mouth.

  A long moment passed until finally, dropping her voice, Mother said ‘Harry made you agree to this?’

  ‘He didn’t make me. I agreed to the idea.’

  I reached over, wrapped my arms around her, feeling her shoulders tremble beneath her woollen cardigan. When at last her sobbing subsided I summoned the courage to look at her again in the eye.

  ‘I want to be there,’ she said, firmly. ‘If you father is … if he has something to say to us, if he is ready to answer my questions, then I am coming. Do you understand? You mustn’t try to stop me. I’ve waited too long.’

  ‘Mother, no … it’s too risky.’ But the expression of hardened determination on her face and the hope that had burgeoned in her watery eyes signalled to me that there was no sense in arguing now. The matter was decided.

  ‘There is something else,’ she added after a prolonged pause. ‘Something I must tell you before this experiment can go a
head.’

  ‘What – what is it? Mother?’

  Her right hand was turning the rings on her left with nervous agitation. ‘You know that I loved your father, in spite of the difficulties …’

  ‘Of course.’

  She lowered her head. ‘He suffered badly, very badly with his nerves. We had a dinner party at the house once. He made every guest wash their hands. Twice.’ Her eye caught mine and I felt myself look away. She had set my heart fluttering with unrest. ‘At the end of the meal he said he had an announcement – a surprise. Kept us all guessing’ – she smiled – ‘he was good at that. I thought he was probably joking. Hoped he was joking. But then he led us all to the front door and showed us it parked right outside: a brand new Rolls Royce.’ She blinked away a glistening tear. ‘Oh, I smiled and laughed and pretended I knew. But of course, I didn’t have a clue. And that was the way it was, when his obsessions became very bad: he made decisions, frittered away the money, and I was always the last to know.’ She nodded to herself, staring past me over the other tables. ‘I still don’t know.’

  ‘Go on,’ I prompted her. We had come to it at last: the edge of the thing, the source of her enduring sadness.

  ‘Sarah, his obsessions, made him do things … worse things … I only learned the truth, how bad it was, years afterwards, on the night….’ As she hesitated, choking back her tears, I resolved to broach the subject that was bothering me the most, to see if there was a connection here.

  ‘I hear you at night sometimes, late, sorting through your wardrobe …’

  She didn’t deny it, but she was leaning away from me, looking down.

  ‘It started the night that man came to the front door. Who was he?’

  ‘Professor McDougall.’

  McDougall. I recognised the name. ‘He’s a member of Harry’s Laboratory.’

  She nodded sharply. ‘He was there on the opening night, singing Mr Price’s praises. He invited me. His guilty attempt at reconciliation, no doubt.’