The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  But even as I uttered the words, I didn’t know if I could muster the strength to confront what was really wrong with her: she thought she was losing her mind, whereas I suspected, with mounting dread, that something else, some malign presence, was taking it from her, stealing her from me by degrees.

  I had met possessed women. I had met Marianne Foyster, who had read my mind and cast fearful prophecies upon me. Something of the glitter in her eyes when we spoke that night in her bedroom at the Rectory – the glitter that had drugged me with possibilities both fantastic and fearful – I had recognised in Mother’s eyes too on the night I came home and found her scrubbing the walls.

  As if hearing these thoughts, Mother said suddenly, ‘We will face it together, my darling. Whatever it is.’

  And Marianne’s words from years before drifted back to me: She is coming … After the losses you will suffer … the Dark Woman will return.

  *

  I remember the date vividly – 11 February 1948, my birthday – though I can only recall the morning of that day. The rest is a blur.

  I rose early and stumbled downstairs half asleep. My mistake. If only I had been more awake I might have noticed the warning. I might have seen the small pile of pebbles heaped on the floor at the foot of my bed.

  We were in the kitchen when the thing happened. With a kindness that was typical of her, Mother presented me with a gift to lift my spirits. I remember smiling as she handed me the jewellery box and the brief thrill of anticipation as she told me it contained a necklace, one she had troubled to make herself.

  I closed my eyes as she looped it around my neck. But the moment she did so, my eyes snapped open. I recoiled on feeling the cold chain against my skin, the heavy object suspended over my heart. Sarah Grey, there is something you can’t see. And it’s around your neck.

  An acute terror rose within me, choking me. I snatched the awful thing from around my neck and threw it violently at the wall. It landed on the floor in plain sight, and I saw that I was right.

  The last relic of Borley Rectory – the ancient Catholic medallion! Stumbling backwards, I tripped and fell. There was a sharp crack as my head connected with tiled floor but I did not lose consciousness. My only thought was to get this thing far away from me. I had not seen it in years. Mother had found it in the drawer where I had left it with the Bible, and now she had unwittingly given it to me as a gift without even knowing what bad feelings attended it, with no idea of its history. But I knew. Now it was clear to me: all these years it had been there, in the background of my life, polluting my existence with its wickedness.

  That afternoon I sent the medallion to Price, with the briefest of notes explaining that I wanted nothing to do with it. ‘This belongs to you,’ I wrote.

  His reply was instant, which did not surprise me; by then he was well under way with preparations for a third book about the Borley affair. I hadn’t bothered to read his second, The End of Borley Rectory; I didn’t need to.

  But in the following weeks I began to doubt myself and wonder if elements of the tale had been true, for as soon as the medallion had left my possession I felt lighter in spirit, younger. A shadow seemed to have lifted from me. The change caused me to reflect and I recalled that the Borley victim had, according to some testimonies, worn a Roman Catholic medallion. So eventually I put pen to paper and wrote to Price for the last time: ‘Tell me, Harry, have you noticed any difference in either your mental state or your physical health since having the Borley brass? Certainly since getting rid of it I have felt better in health and in a happier frame of mind. I would be glad to hear your view.’

  I waited. The days crawled by, and with no reply from my old companion the weight of my anxieties grew heavier upon me. Price’s original letter had stated his intention to have the medallion photographed. I knew it was his custom to delegate such tasks to the services of A. C. Cooper Ltd, a reputable art photographer based in Bond Street, Mayfair. Perhaps they could tell me something useful. It seemed unlikely but, in light of Price’s silence, worth pursuing. The idea led me there late one afternoon, but I was alarmed to find that the shop was gone. All that remained was a blackened space where plush, respectable rooms had once been. There had been a fire.

  A local shopkeeper directed me to Mr Cooper’s temporary business premises a few streets away. There I explained to the photographer the reason for my interest and my past association with Price. When I mentioned the medallion he turned pale and said gravely, ‘So it is true. Strange events do happen.’

  Apparently, while setting up the medallion to be photographed, one of his men had dropped it on the floor. The moment it hit the ground, a very expensive oil painting fell off its easel, with no explanation, and crashed to the floor.

  ‘A coincidence, surely?’ I said.

  ‘Call it that if you will, Miss,’ he said gravely, ‘but is it also a coincidence that a grandfather clock we have kept in that same studio, which has not worked for some fifteen years, sprang into life again at that precise instant? And days later we came into the office to find things had moved about. One of the men … It sounds so silly, but one of the men thought he heard a mirror tapping.’

  I tried my best not to show my alarm, but he saw it anyway and gave me a knowing nod. ‘Just a few days later the fire broke out in the dead of night.’

  Another fire; there had been too many of them.1 And Marianne Foyster’s words from years ago were screaming prophetically in my head: She is coming … After the losses you will suffer, after the fire, after the proof that will be found – the Dark Woman will return.

  All this time I had assumed Marianne had meant the great fire of Borley Rectory and the partial remains we unearthed beneath the house. I felt foolish. Had she not warned me of the Borley curse, that the fate of anyone connected with the Rectory who deceived others was to be haunted and suffer a horrible death? In my limited knowledge of Price’s deceptions I had assumed – dangerously – that she was wrong; there was nothing to fear because he had made everything up, had planted the brass medallion in the house for us to find.

  But what if he hadn’t planted it? Dear God!

  I had to find Price. I had to warn him, for both our sakes.

  I battled through the crowded London streets, dread in my heart. For I was as guilty as all who had ever exploited the ghosts of Borley Rectory to their own ends. The night I left Price broken and alone in his Laboratory, I had done so knowing I had wounded him with a version of the truth. I had let him believe that his little boy was dead, that I had terminated my pregnancy. I hadn’t.

  Robert Michael Grey was born on 16 April 1930. He was the most beautiful child. The midwife and the other women – many of them in the same, unfortunate predicament as me – spoke endlessly of his blue eyes. I could never have harmed anything so precious; so many years watching mediums converse with the dead had granted me an appreciation of life. However, I had prepared to give the baby away, so far as it was possible to prepare for such a thing. It was horrific, watching him being carried away from me at the convent in Yorkshire. I mourned my son from the moment he left my arms, and I have mourned him still further since discovering the identity of the family to whom he was given.

  Memories of the child I had given up to protect Price, to protect us both, assailed me as I hurried through the rain-washed streets. By the time I arrived at Queensberry Place evening was setting in; a glance at my watch told me it was seven o’clock. Would he be there at this hour? I hammered on the door with my fists, I cried out his name helplessly. No response. A passerby looked at me as if I was losing my mind. I think perhaps I was losing my mind, for at that instant a low humming filled my ears and I saw her at last.

  The Dark Woman.

  The dismal figure stood – floated – at the farthest end of the road, merging with the London fog which swirled around her. Her outline was hazy, blurred, perpetually shifting and flickering, like a picture on a badly tuned television. I could feel her rage and betrayal and vengeance b
urning me with human torment.

  And suddenly the darkly clad form was nearer, the droning sound louder. I dared to look at the spirit’s face. Saw deep black holes that might have been eyes. Saw her skin, like grey leather, stretched across her bony features. An immense cold overpowered me as her mouth cracked open and her jaw dropped. Shadows seemed to slide out of her, thrusting forward. And from the gaping cavity that was no longer a mouth but just an inky space, untold misery and malignant feelings poured out of her, flowing into me.

  Trompée,

  trompée,

  trompée.

  My arms shot up in a vain attempt to shield myself from the words flying at me, fired by the phantom’s mind.

  ‘Stop it!’ I cried, pressing my hands to my ears as a tortured wail rose up.

  The nun’s scream – not mine.

  ‘Please stop it, stop it, stop it!’

  Her long wasted arms hung by her sides, her withered hands closed tightly. At the edge of the road, suddenly, as if from nowhere, a large black Labrador caught my eye, its teeth bared and its hackles up. I had looked away from the nun only for a second, but when I glanced back the diabolical form was just a few feet away, raising one arm, extending it towards me, opening what remained of her hand.

  Lying in her smoky palm was the brass medallion.

  In that moment I knew that whatever end awaits me in this life, I am powerless to resist it.

  I blinked. The phantom suddenly dispersed into thousands of individual parts that broke away, humming and buzzing – a thick, swarming mass of flies.

  I ran from the Laboratory, from Queensberry Place.

  When I arrived home I noticed my watch had stopped at precisely seven o’clock that evening. That was significant, but I didn’t yet know how significant. I didn’t have time to think about it. I was far more concerned to know why Mother hadn’t answered when I had called her name.

  I looked about me manically, dashing from room, flicking on the electric lights. As I flew into the hall, stumbling, the main light overhead dimmed then exploded, showering me with glass. ‘Mother!’ I screamed. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’

  By the time I had reached the top of the stairs, I could hear it from behind her bedroom door: the all too familiar scraping, scratching sound: tap-tap-scratch; tap-tap, scratch.

  It was louder now than ever.

  The door handle rattled but refused to turn.

  ‘Mother, please let me in!’

  Panic gripped me. I threw my shoulder against the door once, twice.

  The lock broke on my third attempt. I stumbled into the darkened bedroom, and froze.

  The scratching sound in the wall hadn’t been a mouse or a rat. Something far, far worse had entered our house.

  Scrawled across the walls and the floor and every other surface in Mother’s bedroom was one word scratched out in chalk, hundreds of times, over and over:

  Trompée …

  Trompée …

  Trompée …

  Mother stood facing me in the corner of the room, one hand raised. Gripped in her fingers was a stick of chalk.

  My blood ran cold as I looked into her eyes, which were like black pearls, and saw that all humanity had burned away. I had seen the same thing in Marianne Foyster’s gaze at Borley Rectory. I knew then: whatever vengeful spirit had turned the rector’s wife out of her bed and made her write on the walls was here with me now, perhaps always had been, since the day I had brought the Ignatius medallion into the house. There was no doubt about it: Mother was possessed.

  She dropped the chalk. It struck the floor and snapped. And as Mother slumped to the floor I dashed forward to catch her, too late. God forgive me – I was too late.

  I knew she was dead. Even before I gathered her up in my arms.

  Time slowed down for me as all the fear that had built up in me dissolved into uncontrollable sobbing: tears of guilt. For all these years, it was she, Frances Helen Grey, who had kept me safe.

  I have no idea how long I remained sitting there on the floor, cradling her body like a broken doll and stroking her thinning white hair. My heart was heavier than a dead weight. Now the Nun’s curse had found us for our deceptions.

  Who else had it found?

  As if on cue the tall black telephone jangled beside me. I flinched. Fingers trembling, I fumbled the receiver to my ear. ‘Yes?’ I managed to say, ‘what now?’

  ‘Miss Grey? This is Sidney Glanville.’ Price’s old assistant. He sounded downbeat, apprehensive. But he didn’t need to say anything else.

  I already knew why he had called.

  *

  As I write these concluding words, I am sitting alone in the study in my house. Before me on the desk lies the St Ignatius medallion. I am afraid to gaze at it for too long, afraid of its potential; but as much as I would dearly love to be rid of it, I know I never will be. I have tried many times. I have taken it down to the ponds on Hampstead Heath and dropped it into the water. I have left it on tables in cafés in Piccadilly. I have buried it in the garden. Every time it comes back to me, appearing, as it had first appeared, on a pillow. Except this time on my pillow.

  Your lies will find you out. The adage was as true for Price as for me.

  Three days ago I read in the newspaper of the Society of Psychical Research’s intent to reinvestigate Price’s handling of the Borley affair. They will want to know what I know, they will want the truth. But they will not hear it from me. When I have completed this narrative I will go from here to Bloomsbury, to the eighth floor of the Senate House Library at the University of London where Price’s fantastic library now rests, and I will hide these pages there, among the dusty stacks – the only appropriate place for a tale such as this.

  As I sit here, listening to the rain drumming on the roof, longing for that safe time before the Rectory, before the darkness, I thumb through the pages I have written and I wonder whether there is any significance in this story.

  I think of Father and of Rudi Schneider and how no satisfactory explanation for the miracles he produced at the National Laboratory for Psychical Research was ever found. I think of Velma Crawshaw, the young medium who had told me there was a mark upon me and who, just months before her tragic death, had told us she saw nothing of her own future. I think of Reverend Smith, of the last thing he said to me when we left the Rectory the morning after the fateful seance: that Borley Rectory was evil from top to bottom and it should have been burned to the ground years ago. Well, now the house has burned, and all the rectors who once lived in it have passed away. I think of Vernon Wall and how different my life might have been if I had heeded his early warnings and walked away from the Laboratory. I think of Marianne Foyster, how later in her life she changed her name and claimed that her husband was also her father. I think of Lionel Foyster who, I heard, spent his remaining days locked in his bedroom, his bed soaked in urine, as he rambled about a haunted house and his lost Diary of Occurrences. I think of the reports in the papers of ghosts lurking still in Borley.

  And I think of my beautiful son, Robert, given to the Caxtons, a doctor and his wife living in the valley of Farndale. Because for all those years, across all that time, it wasn’t only the Dark Woman I had seen in my dreams but my beautiful baby boy’s face, his cheeks the softest pink, his skin so new and smooth. I cried through the night until my child was taken from my arms. I cried until the weeks and months rolled by and carried me back to London. I never stopped crying.

  Son, if you should ever read this, believe me: always and forever, I was crying for you.

  What on earth will you make of me? I hope you will consider me a good woman who led a bad life; a woman who had much in common with the legendary Dark Woman of Borley, betrayed and abandoned. If you survived the war I hope that you are more content than your parents ever were, and I hope you have inherited our better qualities – my zest for life and your father’s keen and probing mind. I like to think of you as a distinguished professional, a scientist perhaps or an academ
ic. But mostly I hope that you do not probe the supernatural; for as Price realised that night in his office, those who hunt ghosts are hunted, in turn, by them. They find us eventually as the Dark Woman found your father and will – I am certain – find me.

  But know this: Harry Price will always be part of my family. He is your father so I will always care for him, whether I want to or not.

  I had waited and waited for him to answer my letter but of course he never did.

  Harry Price’s body was discovered the same afternoon I encountered the vision in the road at Queensberry Place, the time of death seven o’clock, the exact time at which my watch stopped. It was his wife who found him, slumped over his writing desk, working on his new book on the Borley affair. His face was frozen, she said, in an expression of absolute terror, the fingers of his left hand still gripping his pen; and in his right hand, securely attached to his gold watch chain, he held a curious item she had never seen before:

  A brass St Ignatius medallion.

  Sarah Grey

  November 1955, London

  * * *

  Note

  1 It is interesting to observe that bizarre and strange accidents were reported at the site of Borley Rectory also. The Suffolk Free Press carried an editorial passage on 24 May 1944 entitled ‘Queer’, which reads:

  ‘I understand that the fire-ruined Borley Rectory … is being demolished and the bricks carted away for rubble. I heard an interesting story the other day which supports the idea that there is always something queer about the place. A local firm was engaged in felling some trees, and ‘everything seemed to go wrong’. Three axes broke in the course of the work; one man received a shoulder injury; and two trees which were roped and cut so as to fall into the grounds, fell into the road instead, the ropes breaking, and a tractor had to be fetched to haul the timber off the road.’

  EPILOGUE

  by Doctor Robert Caxton

  Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens …