The Apparition Phase

by Will Maclean

  ‘My point is – well, it’s twofold really. The first thing to mention is that being a teenager is a heightened emotional state. I remember that much. Everything has equal weight, equal importance. Little dramas and big tragedies are of identical value to the adolescent mind, and both are just as wounding.

  ‘The second thing is – don’t be so hard on yourself. Or your mum and dad. This attempt to find a pattern is entirely understandable, considering the magnitude of what happened – what’s still happening, every day. We often look for logic where logic is absent. It’s—I get it. But it’s causing your parents a huge amount of pain.’

  I thought for a while.

  ‘Even considered objectively,’ I said, ‘what Janice Tupp said is still an incredibly accurate prediction.’

  For the first time in our acquaintance, Mr Henshaw seemed almost annoyed. He set his jaw and frowned, changing the aspect of his face almost entirely.

  ‘It’s frustrating to me how you can be so bright on the one hand, Tim, and so … dim on the other. This girl came to your house and said these things, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then your sister wrote them down, later.’

  ‘Only a short while later. But yes.’

  ‘Well, that short while is important. It’s extremely unlikely – impossible even – that your sister was able to remember verbatim what this girl said.’

  ‘Abi has an excellent memory,’ I said, unconsciously using the present tense. ‘We both do.’

  ‘I’m sure you have a great memory, Tim, but nobody has a perfect one. So that’s one distorting filter these predictions have been through. Next, you say that the doll’s house broke, revealing broken dolls, just as Janice had said. But you yourself conceded it might just be a lucky guess.’

  ‘We did consider—’

  ‘I mean, it’s hardly surprising an old doll’s house would have old dolls in it, is it? I grant you it’s interesting that the doll’s house broke immediately after her visit, but that’s the only out-of-the-ordinary thing I can see in all of this.’

  ‘During,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Tim?’

  ‘During her visit. She was still in the house when it happened.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Henshaw smiled smugly. ‘Really? Where was she?’

  I swallowed. ‘In the attic. She went back up to there to get her coat.’

  ‘On her own?’

  I nodded.

  Mr Henshaw looked at me for a long time.

  ‘You weren’t there!’ I said at last. ‘The doll’s house is very heavy. It took two of us to lift it back. We didn’t hear it fall. Janice couldn’t have pushed it.’ My voice sounded small and weak. I longed for Mr Henshaw to say something.

  A long minute passed where the only sound was the fizzing of the rain on the path outside. It had rained all day. I imagined even the thrush’s anvil would be washed clean by now.

  ‘You think I’m making it up, don’t you?’ I said, eventually.

  ‘Tim,’ said Mr Henshaw. He was smiling again. ‘I think you’re coping. Telling yourself whatever story you need to tell yourself to get through each day. And that’s fine, up to a point. But the way you’ve chosen to do it … it’s enormously upsetting for your parents.’

  I thought about this. Outside the wind had changed direction and the rain was now hurling itself against the window panes. I looked for patterns in the chaos, and could see absolutely nothing, just the random play of drops of water on glass.

  ‘For me, this is the root of the problem here, Tim.’ Mr Henshaw’s face loomed large, his gaze unblinking. ‘This insistence on a paranormal explanation for Abigail’s disappearance … I think it’s a mask. I think it prevents you from accepting the truth, so you cling to it. It stops you from moving on, from recovering. This thing has attached itself to your life and become part of the story, when in fact it has no real existence.’

  I glared at him.

  ‘We need to get beyond a supernormal explanation and focus instead on the facts. Are you ready for that journey, Tim? To accept the facts? To become an adult?’

  He looked slightly manic now. He wasn’t going to let go of this.

  ‘Can you do that, Tim?’

  I smiled and nodded, and resolved with every fibre of my being to retreat back into surly, uncooperative silence next time.

  I waited in a sandwich bar until the worst of the rain subsided, paying 5p for a revolting cup of tea I left largely untouched. By the time I got home it was dark. To my enormous surprise, when I opened the front door, my mother flung her arms around me. She smelled faintly of sherry, and strongly of cigarettes, and had clearly been crying. She had been worried about me coming home late. I told her over and over again what my movements had been, that I was late because I had to seek shelter. I told her over and over again that I was fine.

  15

  Last week’s ‘frank exchange’, as he put it, had energised Mr Henshaw’s approach to me, and he felt we were close to a breakthrough. It had become hugely important to him – the key, in fact, to unlocking my grief and enabling me to move forward – that he dissipate the power, in my mind, of the prophecies of Janice Tupp, and my obsession with what he termed ‘nonscientific explanations’ for Abi’s disappearance. I was astonished by the number and range of opinions he suddenly had on the subject of my wellbeing. Even in our initial conversations it became obvious that he had a very clear shape for my immediate future, whereby I recovered fairly quickly from the worst effects of my grief, resumed school in September; and was able, as soon as possible, to go on to university, which was where somebody bright like me belonged anyway.

  In order to achieve this goal, Mr Henshaw had a two-part plan.

  The first part of his plan was that I find, and talk to, Janice Tupp. Once I saw – in his words – that she was no more than ‘a silly girl with a malicious streak’, I could progress beyond the idea that she had either foreseen a terrible fate for Abi, or cursed us somehow, or both.

  The only problem with this plan was that I was unable to find Janice Tupp, at all. She had left school the previous summer, and drifted off into the netherworld reserved for those determined to neither continue in education nor find a job. I heard a rumour she was ‘shacked up with a bloke’; another rumour went so far as to say she was either pregnant or had actually given birth. Either way, she was nowhere to be found.

  Mr Henshaw was not deterred by the frustration of this first part of his plan. In addition to confronting Janice, Mr Henshaw had another idea, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. All he insisted was that I keep next Saturday free, and travel with him somewhere. He wouldn’t say where.

  On Saturday morning, I met Mr Henshaw on the high street outside Woolworths. The day was grey and oppressive, as it always seemed to be whenever I visited the high street, both at the time, and now, years later, in my memory.

  Mr Henshaw had a surprisingly sensible car. I was expecting a grimy VW Beetle, with CND and SAVE THE WHALE stickers, tail-lights held together with parcel tape. Instead Mr Henshaw pulled up in a tan-coloured Austin Allegro that looked like it had been washed and possibly even waxed recently, and was entirely free of stickers and tape. Mr Henshaw told me we would be in the car for about two hours, but promised me the destination would make the trip worthwhile. So off we went.

  Outside, the suburbs rose and fell in banks of sleepy dilapidation, finally surrendering altogether to blurred walls of corrugated concrete and short, dank tunnels lit sodium orange. The car swooped and dipped like a bird over the concrete bridges and through the underpasses, and by and by, in time marked by the silence between tracks on Mr Henshaw’s cassettes of Yes and Wishbone Ash, the houses and streets gave way to greenery, and the motorway was suddenly bordered by fields. After an hour or so, we turned onto an A-road, and after forty minutes the A-road became a B-road, then a confusing proliferation of B-roads. After fifteen minutes of twisting turns on these smaller roads, I couldn’t reliably have pointed north
.

  And the scenery outside became familiar, although I knew I had never been there before. A field of ripening wheat reached to the horizon, where the stub of a Norman church in knapped flint was the tallest point in a landscape so flat it made my head ache. A pine forest gathered gloom about itself, the low trees clustered tightly together as if keeping secrets. Around us, sandy soil sparkled in the shy sunlight that was fighting its way through the clouds, and without reading a single road sign I knew: we were heading into Suffolk. The county where M.R. James had woven his ghosts from half-remembered childhood days and the horrors and heresies that lurked in the masonry and misericords of a hundred parish churches. The sun was fully shining now, matching my rising exhilaration step for step. For the first time in over a year, I was swept by a feeling of freedom, of release. I felt the oppressive weight of being at home fall away.

  We passed through one of the larger villages, where I briefly saw a greengrocer’s, a war memorial, a second-hand bookshop. We then turned sharply into another B-road.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ I said, half-laughing with the wonder of it all.

  Mr Henshaw said nothing but pointed ahead, through the windscreen.

  And then, glimpsed in flashes through the trees of a small wood, I saw the house.

  The bulk of it was sixteenth and seventeenth century, certainly. Indeed, the wing nearest to us, as we swept up the gravel road towards it, was a fine example of late Elizabethan or Jacobean design, all grand front windows with stone mullions, clearly modelled on the so-called ‘Prodigy houses’ – mansions of great opulence and scale – that were popular at the time. However, it was abundantly easy to see why the house would never grace any architectural textbooks. The Jacobean wing must at one point have had a counterpart, but for reasons unknown it was absent, and the wing was now not mirrored but mocked, it seemed, by a Victorian Gothic wing of such extreme ugliness it must surely have been considered tasteless at the time it was built. The transformation from one style to another was gradual; there had been extensive Victorian restorations and additions, and walls of knapped flint nodules were kept standing by buttresses of bright red brick. The overall effect was one of conflict, the original building struggling in the tentacles of the vulgar addition like a whale gripped by a giant squid. The small wood of ash and oak trees approached the house, shading its sides too completely and too willingly, as if attempting to conceal this misbegotten thing from the world. Before the mostly intact Jacobean doorway was a large semi-circular lawn, recently mowed. Mr Henshaw stopped the car in front of the doorway, and we got out.

  ‘Welcome to Yarlings Hall,’ said Mr Henshaw, smiling.

  On the lawn, two of the most attractive people I had ever seen were playing badminton, wielding curious racquets with long, slender necks and small heads to bat a shuttlecock back and forth. A young woman and a young man, not much older than me, but carrying themselves with a self-assured certainty that made them seem very grown-up indeed; they seemed to own the space they occupied. The young man had sandy-coloured hair that curled magnificently down to his broad shoulders; he wore no shirt, and his upper body was lean and muscular. He looked like a natural athlete, an impression only slightly marred by the cigarette clenched between his teeth. The girl was blandly beautiful, with an edge of studied boredom to her movements, as if she couldn’t entirely commit to anything for risk of appearing foolish. They looked like brother and sister, and behaved as if the rest of the world were a boring distraction from each other. I stared at them in wonder. The young woman looked at me.

  ‘Nice day for badminton,’ I said.

  ‘Battledore,’ said the young woman curtly.

  I didn’t know what that was, and the woman turned away without explanation, cutting me dead. She and her companion immediately resumed their game, once again sharing their energy only with each other. I had evidently been judged, and found unworthy of further attention. I had been part of a dynamic like this once; it was unsettling to see it from the outside.

  Looking again at the racquets the two beautiful youths held, a dark suspicion crossed my mind. This was clearly a refuge for emotionally disturbed teenagers. There were obviously sports, but the terrible possibility existed that there might also be campfires, and sing-songs, and group sessions where the participants were invited to express their feelings. The dark-haired girl was probably a recovering drug addict; the athletic young man had probably fallen to pieces on some military training exercise. This was a retreat for the damaged.

  My blood froze. No wonder Mr Henshaw hadn’t explained where he was taking me. I became aware that I was shaking.

  ‘Just through here,’ said Mr Henshaw, blissfully unaware of the battle I was waging to resist punching him in the back of his head. He walked through the open front door. Following him, I blinked for a second in the cool darkness of a long passageway panelled in dark wood, regaining my vision just quickly enough to see Mr Henshaw duck round a corner. I had no choice but to go after him.

  16

  I followed Mr Henshaw through dark corridors to a large, bright kitchen with a flagstone floor, where the mouth of an enormous black fireplace opened in a wide yawn. Sitting at a table in front of it was a man with shoulder-length light-brown hair, long sideburns and a thin beard. He was roughly the same age as Mr Henshaw; late twenties to early thirties, but seemed to be trying hard to project the demeanour of being somewhere in his middle fifties; what my dad would call a young fogey. He was cleaning a pair of large tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses with a cloth when I entered; he squinted at me helplessly and then put the glasses on, blinking.

  ‘Tim, this is Graham Shaw,’ said Mr Henshaw. ‘Graham, this is Tim Smith. I told you about him on the telephone.’

  I smiled, a bit. I was still very unsure about where this was going.

  ‘Hello, Tim,’ said Graham, standing up and shaking hands. His manner seemed matter-of-fact, but behind the huge square lenses of his glasses his eyes scrutinised me with a thoroughness I found unnerving. ‘Neville has told me a lot about you. I’m sure you’ll want to see the equipment!’

  ‘Equipment?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Neville!’ laughed Graham, slapping Mr Henshaw on the back. ‘You really didn’t tell him anything, did you?’

  ‘I thought it best to show rather than tell,’ said Mr Henshaw.

  What were they talking about? Maybe they were going to give me aversion therapy, to correct my delinquent behaviour, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Thrust deep in my jacket pockets, my balled fists felt like hot coals. Let them try, I thought.

  ‘Come on then, Tim,’ said Graham brightly. ‘This way!’

  Graham took off at a speed that failed to take into account the darkness of the house’s interior and our unfamiliarity with it. The place smelled of mould and dust and ancient bricks, a stale, churchlike smell, fermented over centuries. I felt a sudden flicker of disquiet as we headed deeper into the older part of the house.

  Graham opened a door and ushered us into a spacious room, painted pale blue. The huge windows with their solid stone mullions, looking out onto the lawn, told me that we were in the room that took up the entire front of the surviving original wing. At some point it had probably been even larger, but the ill-advised rebuilding that blighted the house had clearly been at work here too, and the room had an oddly truncated feel to it. The windows felt too large for the space now, as did the fireplace, and nothing seemed properly aligned with anything else.

  There was no furniture apart from a circular table, around which stood six chairs, and, against one wall, a small sideboard. On the sideboard I could see a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a thermometer, and a large, bulky device with two needle dials, which I guessed was an electromagnetic field detector.

  I stared at them in wonder. Together, these items could only have one purpose that I knew of.

  ‘This is ghost-hunting equipment!’ I said. ‘You’re – looking for a ghost!’

  ‘We are indeed,’ sa
id Graham, idly flicking a switch on the electromagnetic field detector. Both needles flickered in unison and were still.

  ‘This house is … haunted?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Graham, smiling, almost proudly. ‘By one Tobias Salt, no less. From what we can discover, a truly terrible figure who performed his duties as local magistrate-cum-witchfinder with the vicious zeal of the Puritan. People have been encountering his spirit here for years.’

  ‘Encountering – how, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ Graham pushed his enormous glasses further up his nose as he peered up at the ceiling. ‘He’s been seen many times, by many people. Usually a black-clad figure, dressed in robes. Witnesses have also spoken of a smell of lavender – lavender is absent from all of the house’s gardens – as well as the sound of footsteps, whispering, and, occasionally, the ringing of bells.’

  It was curious I hadn’t heard of such a haunting before, but Britain, whilst not a big place, is an almost insanely detailed one, rich in superstition and story, and, as such, densely populated by ghosts. There was no way I could ever know them all. Besides, the elements of the haunting described by Graham were so unspectacular, the accompanying phenomena so run-of-the-mill, so precisely the things one heard about ghosts and hauntings with monotonous regularity, that it occurred to me that I may have even read about this place and not actually remembered doing so.

  ‘Have you heard any sounds?’

  Graham smiled thinly. ‘Not yet, no.’

  ‘What about Raudive voices?’ I looked enviously at the tape recorder. ‘Have you recorded any?’

  ‘Impressive,’ said Graham.

  ‘I told you he knew his stuff!’ said Mr Henshaw. ‘What on earth are Raudive voices?’

  ‘Disembodied voices picked up as ambient noise in field recordings,’ said Graham succinctly. ‘And to answer your question, Tim, we’ve recorded about a dozen hours of audio, but playback has revealed nothing more untoward than the creaking and settling of an old, rambling manor house.’