by Will Maclean
‘I think Sally definitely experienced something,’ I said carefully. ‘I have no doubt that what she felt was real enough to her. It certainly felt real enough in there.’
Graham smiled. ‘Qualify it with faint praise as much as you like. I think this represents a breakthrough. Sadly, the audio tapes are clear and there were no anomalous readings on any of the meters, but nonetheless. We must conclude that we are now able to communicate fully with our Mr Salt.’
‘Providing that was him,’ said Juliet. ‘He didn’t sound too sure. And there are two sets of handwriting.’
‘A classic sign of automatic writing,’ said Graham, knocking his pipe on the edge of the table. ‘I’m almost surprised there weren’t more. No, this is Mr Salt all right. The genuine article. Who else would it be?’
I looked down at the table, at the scrawled and scratched words, and the unthinkable occurred to me. This was the kind of thing Abi would have found amusing. To see the look on my face. Then I remembered Mr Henshaw’s warning, the thing he had been afraid of, and felt ashamed.
That evening after dinner, we all sat once more in the lounge, drinking tea. Even Seb was subdued; the events of the séance were not something any of us could easily shrug off, and, as before, no one really felt like being alone. I felt an urgent need to ask Neil’s opinion, but only, I realised, because I wanted him to explain the experience away, to make it safe and controllable, because I found that I couldn’t.
After an hour or so, Sally still hadn’t reappeared, and Graham went up to check on her. After forty-five minutes, he re-entered the room, looking somewhat subdued.
‘How’s she doing?’ said Juliet.
Graham removed his glasses, polished the lenses on his sleeve. ‘Fine. Although, looking back, it was maybe unwise to press ahead so soon after yesterday’s … results.’ He put his glasses back on. ‘In fact, for the good of us all, and Sally especially, I suggest we take tomorrow off.’
‘Great!’ said Seb.
‘I also think it might do us good to get out of the house for the day.’
‘Even better!’ said Seb.
‘Maybe on some kind of educational or archaeological excursion.’
‘Christ!’ said Seb.
Juliet shot him a look. ‘Where were you thinking of?’ she asked.
‘Well, we have the cars, so … the sky’s the limit, really. Anyone have any ideas?’
‘Grime’s Graves are the obvious place,’ I said. ‘They’re not too far.’
Graham pointed the stem of his pipe at me. ‘Excellent, Tim. And let’s not forget Sutton Hoo.’
Polly frowned. ‘Or … we could go further afield. Make it a real day out.’
‘Oh, better and better,’ said Seb, into his coffee mug.
‘What about Stonehenge?’ said Neil. A small thrill went through me. Abi and I had often petitioned our parents to go to Stonehenge, to no avail. Dad had driven past it numerous times – never once thinking to stop – and had decided from these fragmentary glimpses that the world’s most famous prehistoric monument was hugely overrated. It was very disappointing, he said. Much smaller than you’d imagine. Half of it had fallen down, for Pete’s sake.
‘Now, Neil, that really is too far,’ said Graham. ‘You’re looking at an eight-hour round trip, and for what? To see a monument that’s lost its original pagan significance long ago. It’s no doubt currently full of hippies, readying themselves for what their drug-addled minds think the summer solstice entails.’
‘What about the Uffington White Horse?’ said Polly. Another delighted thrill went through me. All of the places I’d ever wanted to visit – ancient, mysterious, strange – a million miles from my suburban existence – were now being idly touted as possible destinations.
‘Hmm,’ said Graham. ‘A lovely thing, to be sure, but again, maybe too far.’
‘Avebury?’ I said. I knew it was even further away than Uffington, but I just wanted to join in.
Graham shook his head. ‘Again, too far. Which is a real shame, as the Avebury complex is probably my favourite Neolithic monument in the British Isles. Despite the truly stupid decision to drive a tarmac road through the circle itself, which to my mind is emblematic of—’
‘Right,’ said Polly. ‘Given that everything we suggest is halfway across the country, it seems we’re out of options. We might as well head to Grime’s Graves. Or Dunwich? Or maybe—’
‘Rollright.’
We all turned. Sally was framed in the doorway. Although she had dark circles under her eyes, her voice was sure and certain.
‘Sals!’ Graham got to his feet and rushed over to her. ‘How are you feeling?’ He guided her into a chair as if she were an invalid.
‘I’m fine, thank you. Honestly. It was just a shock, that’s all. The – realness of it.’
‘I’m sure. Are you OK to be up and about?’
‘Yes. And I want to visit Rollright. If we can.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Graham. ‘It’s still a long way. And the original stones have been repositioned many times over the years. If we wanted to look at an ancient monument that’s been poorly restored, we could just stay in this house.’ He laughed mirthlessly at his own joke, such as it was.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Sally, ‘I’ve always wanted to go.’
‘How far away is it?’ Juliet asked. Neil scanned the AA Road Atlas.
‘Er … quite a way. Not as far as Stonehenge, though. Still about a hundred and forty miles? So about two, two and a half hours.’
There was a silence whilst we waited for a decision.
‘It’s far away, but …’ said Graham, ‘… if that’s what you want to do, Sals.’
‘It is,’ said Sally. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the Rollright Stones, but I’ve never been.’
‘How does everyone else feel about a long drive?’
Sebastian sighed heavily. Everyone else looked keen.
‘It’ll be an adventure!’ I said. It really would be. Despite reading about stone circles for my entire life, I had never actually been to one. I felt almost sick with excitement.
‘That’s the spirit, Tim!’ said Graham patronisingly. ‘We’ll come back refreshed, and take on Tobias Salt with renewed vigour!’
31
After breakfast the next morning, we drew matchsticks to decide who would undertake the boring chore of going into the village and getting supplies for our trip.
I lost.
Everyone bar Polly had something to say about the village. Seb told me it was the most boring place on earth; Juliet said some of the shops looked interesting. Graham told me the church was fourteenth century, and a good example of the period, and Neil chipped in that the church had a rood-screen that had survived the Reformation largely unscathed, apart from the saints’ faces being obliterated. Sally simply gave me directions, telling me I could take a short cut through a five-bar gate marked Cobbett’s Wood.
The day was a fine one, showing off Cobbett’s Wood at what I suspected was its most beautiful. The only woods I knew well were filled with fly-tipped debris; these woods felt primordial and unspoiled, as if I were the first person ever to walk in them. Birdsong rose from the undergrowth, the woods were sweet-smelling, and everything felt resoundingly alive. I realised I had been in Suffolk for four days now and had seen virtually none of it. Inside the house, it was easy to forget we were in one of the most beautiful parts of the country.
After half a mile, the woods stopped abruptly at a wooden gate leading onto the road. Turning left, I came to some houses of red brick and knapped flint, huddled around a triangular lawn at a fork in the road; as Sally had instructed, I ignored the left-hand fork and carried on walking. The next twenty or so houses were squat 1930s bungalows, which had long ago congealed into a stale, one-dimensional Englishness, with identical pink and yellow rosebushes in every garden, and smiling concrete gnomes pushing wheelbarrows into nowhere.
These houses were put to shame by the chaos of seventeenth- and eight
eenth-century dwellings that made up the village proper. Each one a different size and shape, it was easy to ascribe to every house a distinct personality. Some of them were merely two tipsy, sloping storeys, whilst others stretched to three and even, in one case, four; stiff-backed and tall, the houses of the aspirant middle classes of two or three hundred years ago. The village was a pretty, unpretentious place, neither preserved in the unnatural stasis of heritage, nor allowed to run down into shabbiness. It was clearly a place thought of fondly by the people who lived there.
The single street around which the village clustered was lined with shops – a butcher, a fishmonger, a greengrocer, and, eventually, the small shop that Sally had told me about. Everyone I passed – an old woman with an extremely pale face; a fat, ruddy man in a brown shirt walking a colossal Alsatian; a man with grey sideburns and a comb-over, wearing a lemon-yellow jacket – either smiled or acknowledged me with a nod of the head. I wondered how they would react if they knew what I was part of, what I had been brought to Yarlings for.
As I walked round the gloomy interior of the village shop, placing things from the list into a wire basket, I noticed that, staggeringly, they seemed to have a licence to sell alcohol here, in an actual shop. Was this normal, out here in the countryside? Could I get away with purchasing any? I still had some of my own money in my jacket. Sally had mentioned at dinner yesterday that she liked red wine. There was a cluster of bottles of red wine here, and I could easily put one among the other items, and if I was denied, it would not be embarrassing, as no one here knew me. I looked at the shop’s selection of dusty bottles. The labels and the names meant nothing to me, some being in French and others Spanish, as if to make the task of assessing their merits doubly impossible. Eventually, rather than risk handing Sally a bottle of something that demonstrated beyond all doubt my lack of worldliness or maturity, I decided not to bother. The red-faced woman at the till smiled at me as she filled two yellow carrier bags with cheese and tomatoes and bread.
‘On holiday, are you?’ She smiled. The smile seemed fixed.
‘Yes.’ I smiled back. ‘Sort of.’ I had an idea. ‘I’m staying about a mile away, with a few friends. In a house.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. You might know it … Yarlings?’ I watched carefully for any reaction on her part as I said the name. If strangers came to the village of Borley, wanting to see the ruins of the rectory, I imagined that the locals knew immediately why they had come, and what they were looking for.
‘Lovely!’ she said. She smiled at me again. ‘That’s one pound and five altogether.’ I handed her the money. She bashed away at the noisy till and handed me my change, smiling yet again for good measure.
The shops in the village all seemed to have their doors propped open to catch the morning sunlight, apart from one. The front of this shop was a heavy black Victorian bay window with small, square panes, the whole thing sagging with age, almost melting into the street. A hand-painted sign above the door read ‘H. Wells, Bookseller. Modern and Antiquarian’. I never could resist a bookshop, and certainly not one like this. I pushed the door open with one of my shopping bags, and a bell jangled.
Like most small second-hand bookshops, the place straddled the line between stocking a range of titles on all subjects, and the kind of compulsive book-hoarding that, if exhibited by a close relative, would be enough of a concern for you to seek professional help on their behalf. There were books everywhere; in rows two-deep on the cramped black shelves that ran floor-to-ceiling across every wall; in precarious formations atop the free-standing bookcases; stacked in piles on the floor, the desk, the radiator, the window ledges. At the sound of the bell, a French bulldog emerged from beneath the desk and regarded me with a weary look before curling up in a wicker basket. I saw a tall, reedy woman in her thirties standing on a battered kick-stool as she placed books on a high shelf. She wore a pinstriped jacket with the arms rolled up, and a black pencil skirt. She turned to look down at me as I entered, pushing her spectacles up the bridge of her nose.
‘Good morning,’ she said, now not looking at me. ‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’
I had spent much of my young life learning how to make suspicious adults trust me, so much so that the routine was now second nature. You had to speak enthusiastically and clearly, in a received pronunciation, BBC announcer voice, with no hints of rough edges. You had to declare an interest in something dull and worthy, like model aeroplanes or military headgear, which subconsciously reassured your target adult that you were a morally upright young person and weren’t interested in pop music or drugs or Satanism. And above all, you had to be polite.
‘Do you have any books about local wildlife?’ I asked. I was pleasantly surprised by how bright and eager my voice sounded, even to me. ‘Birds, specifically, but any general guide would be good!’
She turned back to me and smiled. I had her full attention now. ‘Well, there are several things scattered around, but I fear they’re all either rather dry or old, or both. You’re welcome to have a dig around, though!’ She said this last sentence as a joke, rather than an extremely precise description of what I’d have to do to find anything in this place.
‘Great!’ I said. ‘And … do you have anything about local folklore, myths and legends, that sort of thing?’
‘You might be rather luckier in that regard,’ she said. She pushed her glasses up onto her forehead. ‘We had something of a glut of that sort of thing a while back. A prominent local historian popped his clogs and I – as a somewhat less-prominent local historian – inherited most of his library, once the relatives had stripped the carcass, as it were. There’s plenty of his bequest still scattered around, if you’re willing to rummage. What were you looking for, exactly?’
I stopped myself from shrugging. There is, or was, a certain class of adult – and this woman, with her ferociously bright blue eyes and her excellent, stiff-backed posture, was very definitely a member of that class of adult – that hates shrugging. I was forced to provide a more definite answer.
‘Er – well, I’m looking for information about a specific house. Me and my friends are currently staying there. Yarlings? You know it? The large one up the road, about a mile away?’
‘I do indeed,’ said the woman. ‘Early seventeenth century, but since subject to many alterations. I think the only original part of the house left is the dining hall, and some of the reception rooms. It’s in Pevsner’s, but I think he’s rather more damning.’ She seemed proud to show off both her knowledge of the place and the speed of her recall of it. ‘You’re looking for information about the history of the house?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You know. The stories and legends. Especially about its owner around the time of the Civil War.’
She stared down at me with a curious expression on her face.
‘Which owner would that be?’
‘Tobias Salt?’ I hazarded carefully. I felt her gaze intensify.
‘I don’t know the name.’
Her stare was intolerable. However, if the stories of Tobias Salt were half as lurid and unpleasant as Graham had made out, was it any wonder the locals wished to keep their murderous former resident to themselves? A wife-and-daughter-killing psychopath was hardly the kind of thing that would bring tourists flooding in, at least, not the kind of tourists anybody wanted. Again, I had never been to Borley, but I could understand how tiresome the locals must find the stream of researchers, dowsers and devil-worshippers who made the pilgrimage to their quiet corner of the world.
‘As I say, it was just after the Civil War,’ I continued, watching her closely. ‘A thoroughly bad lot, by all accounts. A Puritan witch-finder with a zeal for burning those he suspected of witchcraft. Apparently, he also did away with his wife and daughter, in some kind of ritual.’
The woman looked extremely alarmed. ‘Where did you hear this story?’
‘A – friend – of mine uncovered it. Apparently, it’s not very widely known.’<
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‘It certainly is not,’ said the woman. She stepped down from the kick-stool, smoothed her hands over her skirt, then offered me her right hand to shake. ‘Forgive my manners. I’m Hattie Wells, I’m the owner here.’
‘Tim Smith,’ I said. ‘As I say, I’m staying here with friends. At Yarlings.’
‘I see.’ Again, Hattie Wells peered at me with her uncomfortable, assessing gaze. ‘And what else have people told you about … Tobias Salt?’
‘Not much. Apparently, he was given the place as a reward for his military service with the Parliamentarians. After that, he went bananas, and started to practise witchcraft whilst affecting to suppress it.’
Hattie Wells slipped behind her spectacularly cluttered desk and produced a notepad from a drawer. She immediately began to scribble something down.
‘Apparently,’ I said, watching her carefully, ‘the place is haunted.’
‘Oh?’ said Hattie Wells, looking up at me, grinning dismissively. ‘Where isn’t?’
‘Yes. There’s, um, some talk of people being driven out by ghostly activity. Former owners and tenants.’
‘Really? Well, it certainly wasn’t the last lot, the Collmeres. They left because the place got too expensive to maintain.’ She chewed her pencil thoughtfully, as the possibility of an alternative explanation took hold. ‘At least, that’s what they said. I have to say, this is all very interesting. The village is largely free of the grotesques one routinely finds in English social history, especially in East Anglia and Essex. Are you sure about all this?’
‘You’ve honestly never heard of Tobias Salt?’
She shook her head. ‘But if what you’re telling me is correct, I can see why the subsequent owners of the house kept the story to themselves.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This – friend – only discovered it by chance, in the parish records.’ I remembered something. Fishing in my jacket pocket, I found the folded foolscap sheets that were The True History of Tobias Salt. ‘Here. This is everything we know.’ Before I could think better of it, I handed it to her.
