The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  ‘Well, what did it say?’ I asked, my heartbeat racing now.

  ‘Here,’ said Price, turning the book towards me. ‘See for yourself.’

  This is the script he showed me:

  Séance of 31 October 1937

  The circumstances under which the following scripts were produced are as follows: Upon our return from the Rectory I showed my daughter Helen the scripts that had been produced there (25 October). She had not previously used a planchette, and we had given her no detailed account regarding our own writing. In our absence, and unbeknownst to us, she used the planchette with the results that follow. During the course of the writing there were many ordinary domestic interruptions, such as telephone calls, callers, etc., when the board was temporarily left.

  Who is there? What is your name? Marie Lairre.

  How old were you when you passed over? 19.

  Were you a novice? Yes.

  Why did you pass over? (No reply.)

  Where did you hear Mass? (Indistinct.)

  Will you please spell each letter? B-o-r-l-e-y.

  Have you a message? Chant Light Mass.

  Do you want it yourself? Yes.

  Why? I am unha … (Three letters indistinct.)

  Were you murdered? Yes.

  When? 1667.

  How? Stran … (Last letters indistinct.)

  Were you strangled? Yes.

  Will our Mass be sufficient? No.

  What Mass do you want? Requiem.

  Where did you come from? Havre.

  Are you French? Yes.

  What was the name of your nunnery or convent? Bure.

  Do you want a burial as well as Mass? Yes.

  Do you wish to leave Borley? Yes.

  Are your own past actions the cause of your being unable to leave? Yes. What was that action? Death.

  What shall we do to help? Light Mass Prayers. Get a priest.

  Can Reverend Henning help you? Yes.

  Did you write the messages on the wall at Borley? Yes.

  Do you want the Mass on any special day? Yes.

  Which month? June.

  Which day? 13.

  Can you tell us why you want the Mass on that day? (Indistinct.)

  Please repeat carefully. My murder.1

  ‘So you see,’ said Price, studying my face as this information sank in, ‘a name was revealed.’

  ‘Marie Lairre,’ I breathed. Then I turned to look at my old employer. His heavy brow was creased into a frown in a way that made me wish him younger. ‘Harry, this is remarkable. Such detail.’

  ‘Yes. On the whole, I don’t know quite what to make of it.’

  But I did know; because ever since Glanville had told me about the French dictionary that had appeared next to the cold spot on the landing outside the Blue Room, my mind had been drawing together the clues. I showed Price the floor plans I had torn from the book. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘When laid on top of each other the cold spot on the landing of the first floor correlates with the area in the cellar beneath and the place where you first found the older bricks, the remains of some earlier building, in the earth. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And at the same time, before we went upstairs, Vernon Wall’s foot crashed through a well cover nearby.’

  ‘I remember. I was slow to help get him out,’ said Price with a grin. His eyes drifted, studying every detail of my office: the film posters on the wall, the piles of letters on my desk, invitations to film premieres and fashion shows. Here were clues to my new life, about which he knew so little. I wondered then if I had become as much a mystery to him as he had been to me.

  ‘So you see,’ I continued, ‘that well must sit underneath the cold spot on the landing, two floors above it. You remarked upon it yourself.’

  His eyes widened with the memory. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I? You’re theorising that the cold spot and the well are connected.’

  ‘No, not theorising; I know! Harry, these planchette writings confirm exactly what Marianne Foyster told me she could sense: that the nun was French, was brought to Borley and was murdered. According to these writings, that’s exactly what happened: she was brought by someone important, someone who loved her, from a convent at Le Havre in France to a house that once stood on the Rectory site in Borley. And there she was betrayed, deceived, murdered. Look,’ I pointed at the page, ‘the word is explicit – “strangled” – as is the date: 13th of June 1667. This is it.’ I looked up at him. ‘This is what we’ve been looking for!’

  ‘What is?’ he asked. The look on his face hovered somewhere between envy and admiration.

  ‘A clue – she wants us to find her remains and lay her to rest with a requiem Mass, Harry. “Mass, light, prayers.” Everything we need to know was written on those walls. Don’t you see? It’s all in this book,’ I said earnestly.

  He drew nearer and rested his hand gently on my arm as I leafed through the book, stopping at the relevant pages. ‘It all fits – the wall writings, the plauchette messages, the cold spot over the landinh, the prophecy – all of it.’

  Price raised his eyebrows. ‘You’re saying the clues were there for us from the first time we ever set foot in that house?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said urgently, ‘and the bricks you noticed protruding from the earth? They could be the remains of Borley Manor, Harry – the manor the Smiths told us about, the manor mentioned here in the planchette writings. The manor that was the residence of—’

  ‘The Waldegrave family,’ finished Price, wide-eyed. ‘Good God, Sarah, you realise what this could mean?’

  I nodded. ‘That a member of the Waldegrave family murdered the nun, Marie Lairre. Harry, that’s it!’

  I thought I could see admiration in his eyes as they skimmed over my face. ‘My goodness, look how far you have come,’ he said with gentle appreciation. ‘I taught you well.’

  ‘I taught myself in the end, didn’t I? I had to.’

  He nodded and looked down. ‘Though I think perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves. ‘Those wall writings were written by Marianne Foyster herself, or her husband.’

  ‘It’s possible they wrote some of them,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe they wrote them all. I saw one, right next to me, which had not been there before.’ A thought struck me. ‘Perhaps Marianne was channelling the messages psychically without knowing it. That’s possible, isn’t it? Marianne told me years ago she felt certain the nun’s bones were buried somewhere on the Rectory site.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ I said earnestly, ‘this could be our opportunity to find them. Perhaps we’re supposed to find them! Perhaps—’

  He didn’t allow me to finish my sentence. ‘And show the world that we have faith in the reliability of planchette data? You know I have my reservations about the evidential merits of automatic writing, Sarah. It would hardly reflect well on my reputation to be seen suddenly championing its application.’

  I glared at him. ‘Forget about your precious reputation for a moment, Harry! Until now you have ignored me every step of the way on this investigation. You haven’t seen me in years! After all this time, I think I have earned the right to be trusted.’

  He nodded but said nothing and I felt anger colouring my face.

  ‘Harry Price, you really are unbelievable. It was you who came here today asking for my help.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, holding his hands up in protest, ‘all right.’

  ‘No!’ I cried, ‘It’s not all right! You have no idea, no idea at all, what I went through for you, how much I sacrificed, the other people I had to give up.’ I gasped for air. ‘If I’m doing this, I’m doing it for me! Understood?’

  ‘Very well,’ he said softly. ‘What are you proposing?’

  ‘That we dig,’ I said simply. ‘Gather a team of men and excavate the ruins.’

  ‘But that could take months! The cellars will be full of debris. It won’t be the easiest of tasks to clear it, especially if war comes. Essex would be ri
ght in the middle of any enemy flight path. The site is huge. Where would we begin?’

  ‘Where we’ve been told to begin. Look,’ I said, pointing to a photograph of a segment of wall writing in the book. ‘We interpreted this message as reading: MARIANNE AT GET HELP ENTANT BOTTOM ME. There is no doubt that the first word is Marianne. But compare the clarity of these letters to the scribbles underneath. They’re barely legible. And first interpretation makes no sense whatsoever. You can see here, on the left, the words “GET HELP”. That’s fine. But over here, on the left, further down, there is the letter “W”. With me so far?’

  Price leaned in, nodded and said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘From here the pencil seems to have curved upwards and then down. Do you see, Harry? It doesn’t leave the wall.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It begins a new word again, immediately beneath. Here, you can quite clearly discern the letter “E”. You interpreted the two letters that followed as “T”. I don’t think that’s right, They look more like the double letter “I”. Which would spell ‘WELL”.

  He nodded and blinked.

  ‘You thought the last letter was “T”. But look at the odd way the base of the letter is drawn.’ I stared at him. ‘It’s not a “T”, Harry, it’s a “K”.’

  I reached for a pencil and paper and frantically scribbled the words out:

  WELL TANK BOTTOM ME.

  Price stared down in awe at the newly deciphered message, and then looked at me in wonder, shaking his head and clasping his hands together. ‘We are playing different chords now, Sarah, but we are still making music. That’s brilliant! Simply brilliant!’

  I smiled with pride. Now we knew where to dig. ‘The bones of the murdered nun are beneath the Rectory, in the well in the cellar. The prophecy said “you must go if you want proof”. Well, let’s go!’

  Price was looking at me uncertainly. ‘You’re suggesting we ask permission from the Queen Anne’s Bounty2 to dig the place up on the basis of some wall writings and automatic writing gleaned from seances.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. The sooner we do so, the better.’

  I could see he was uncertain about the idea.

  ‘Harry,’ I said, lowering my voice, ‘you owe me this.’

  ‘I had forgotten how stubborn you are, Sarah.’

  I had to admit that in this affair, I was. And I would not apologise for it; I was driven by a conviction to know the truth, to find reassurance that I could still escape the dark fate that Marianne Foyster had foretold. Whoever reads this will wonder, I am sure, about the secret I carried that connected me with that house. I wondered about it often too, and I knew I had to lay it to rest.

  ‘I won’t take no for an answer. Come on, Harry! Why knock on a door you’re not prepared to enter?’

  ‘Very well,’ said Price, getting to his feet. ‘Then the Rectory will yield its secrets after all. Come, Sarah, let’s begin!’

  I sprang up to follow him. As I passed the mirror on my office wall my eye was caught by a gleam of light reflected in its glass. But when I turned and looked, I saw only my reflection and my eyes, wide with alarm, staring back at me.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Price. ‘What did you see?’

  I had wanted to tell him oh so badly. That he might understand at last. I thought in that moment that perhaps I could explain and offer us both some release from perpetual confusion. This haunting. I wanted to take it all back, to relinquish the hurt, to return to that night when Mother and I had walked together to his Laboratory, back when I could have chosen another path: worked for a charity or become a teacher. I tried to remember what life had been like before Harry Price but couldn’t.

  ‘Sarah, what did you see?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Really, it’s nothing.’

  Of course that was a lie, another secret I kept from him. For how could I have admitted what I thought I had seen in the mirror? A chain glinting in the lamplight hanging like a noose around my neck.

  * * *

  Notes

  1 ‘The Haunting of Borley Rectory. Private and Confidential Report’.

  2 The Queen Anne’s Bounty was a fund established in 1704 to augment the incomes of the poorer clergy of the Church of England. The bounty was funded by the tax on the incomes of all English clergy, which was paid to the Pope until the Reformation, and thereafter to the Crown.

  – 32 –

  A PSYCHIC FETE

  Just six weeks before the Second World War engulfed Europe a party was held in the gardens of the ruined Rectory to raise funds for the restoration of Borley Church. Reverend Alfred Henning had suggested, rather cleverly I thought, to theme the event as a ‘psychic fete’ with attractions including a guided tour of the ruined building by its new owner, one Captain Gregson, who had purchased the building when Price’s tenancy had ended. Captain Gregson was the last owner of Borley Rectory and had moved into the house on 16 December 1938, just two months before the fire.1

  On Wednesday 21 June 1939, I took a day’s holiday and travelled with Price back to that strange and out-of-the-way place along with twenty-five members of the London Ghost Club. I was curious to see the present state of the dilapidated Rectory for myself of course, but more importantly I wanted to ascertain the viability of excavating the cellars before the whole area was cleared and the bricks taken away. Anyway, I reminded myself, the event might actually be fun.

  However, I regretted attending from the instant I set foot in the Rectory grounds, for as I wandered around the tangled garden beneath the heat of that dusty afternoon, passing the games of skittles, the coconut shy and the white elephant stall, my mind soon returned to the many events I had witnessed there ten years before and I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable and detached, as though I was viewing the games of darts and the pig-pelting competition along the Nun’s Walk through a pane of glass. I couldn’t even stand still long enough to participate in the other ladies’ insipid conversations. Their words were lost in the rustling summer breeze, drifting around my head as intangible as smoke. I smiled, but had no idea why, because none of this seemed quite real to me. It was deceptively perfect, for it all too thinly disguised the truth.

  War was coming.

  Everyone knew it, though few in this picturesque setting of English gentility wanted to know. Children played, women laughed, men talked lightly of their horses and of politics and of how war on the scale they had witnessed before ‘could never happen again’. But their eyes showed their true fear, and the laughter was hollow. Here was an England clinging to the last vestiges of hope that would soon crumble, like the old Rectory looming over us.

  After a while Mrs Butler, wife of the then Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, took to the wooden stage to deliver her welcome speech. Behind her, Borley Rectory had been reduced to little more than an abandoned shell of blackened bricks. Its windows gaped where the glass had shattered and blown out from the heat; its high roof was gone, collapsed inwards upon the rubble below; no doors remained, only deep spaces leading nowhere.

  My observations quickly gave way to reflection. Had I never come here in 1929, I might never have learned of this place’s secrets or been touched by the malevolent, hateful presence that dwelt within these grounds – a spirit intent on observing and punishing deceit. I wished I could go back. I wished I could protect my mother from the hatred and bitterness and seething malice that I suspected was the cause of her long drawn-out suffering.

  On her best days she answered questions perfectly coherently. Those were moments to savour, moments to remember during the other, darker times, when confusion reigned in her fluttering, darting eyes.

  Standing in the Rectory grounds that summer afternoon, I rubbed my bare arms against an unnerving chill that shuddered through me. In my head I heard peculiar sounds from Mother’s house, which ran now like a soundtrack through my life:

  Tap-tap-scratch; tap-tap, scratch.

  ‘Sarah, come and meet Captain Gregson.’ Pri
ce’s voice made me turn. Before me was a tall, robust man in his fifties. ‘Shall we go over here?’ Price suggested, and we walked away from the light-spirited garden function towards the old summerhouse at the far end of the grounds. I looked back at the Rectory and at a cloud of birds swooping slowly around one of its crumbling chimneys. Swooping too slowly, as if the sky was thickening. And then, impossibly, the summer’s day was blowing away, dissolving. The years turning back as darkness gathered and folded around me. I spun round to face the garden, seeking the reassuring presence of the other guests; but there was nothing. Every soul had vanished.

  I blinked.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Opened my eyes.

  Before me now, was the Rectory – but not my Rectory. This was the Rectory as it had once been – clean, intact windows, roof unbroken, red brickwork glowing softly, solidly, under the moon. And at the front of the house a window that hadn’t been there before.

  I scanned the gardens, the path skirting their perimeter, and through the darkness I thought I saw a gliding figure. This is a dream, I thought. This can’t be real.

  Suddenly the air was thick with heat and crackling sounds. A dreadful scent of smoking wood brought tears to my eyes.

  Time tilted, balanced itself. I was back in the garden. In my time. How far into the past had I gone? To Price and the Reverend Henning, I had travelled no distance at all. Their conversation babbled in mid-flow, as it had when I had left them. I had been with them, I had gone, I had come back. And like the Rectory, I had been here all the time.

  Looking towards the Nun’s Walk, I asked Captain Gregson for his opinion on the matter of the haunting. He had been living in the cottage adjoining the Rectory, which had escaped the fire, for longer than a year. Did he believe the tales that went with the house?

  ‘What I believe is neither here nor there,’ he answered. ‘It’s what I know that matters. And I am obliged to trust the evidence of my own eyes and ears.’

  He told us then how his two cocker spaniels refused to enter the Rectory courtyard, how each went mad with terror at something they sensed beyond the threshold.