Shiverton Hall (14 page)

‘So what you’re saying is that this might not be the curse at all? That it might be something else?’ Arthur said slowly.

‘It’s possible,’ George admitted. ‘There were ghouls in this area long before the Shiverton curse – why do you think that Ma Watkins wanted to live around here in the first place? The whole county has always been crawling with spooks.’

‘Evil attracts evil,’ Penny said quietly. ‘It would make sense that after so many awful things happened here, the place would be a magnet for all that stuff.’

They sat for a while and considered this grim possibility.

‘There is, of course, another explanation,’ George said.

‘What’s that?’ Arthur asked.

‘That the Shiverton curse is back, but this time no one is safe.’

At lunchtime, Arthur and his friends were walking past the maze when something occurred to Penny.

‘George,’ she began, ‘you said that those things in Threapleton were phantoms. What exactly
is
a phantom?’

‘It’s the same as a ghost,’ Arthur said.

‘No, no, no, my friend,’ George said, wagging his finger knowledgeably. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Ghosts are human spirits that have got stuck in the mortal realm. They might be spooky, but they’re harmless – they can’t touch you or hurt you.’

‘Why don’t I like where this is going?’ Arthur said warily.

‘Whereas a phantom can harm you,’ George said. ‘In fact, a phantom’s sole reason for existing is to harm. They know what scares you and they can take on any form. They can even become inanimate objects if it serves their purpose. Once Grandpa swore that a watering can in his house was a phantom.’

‘Was it?’

‘No, actually, it was just a watering can.’

‘So,’ Penny said, frowning, ‘a phantom can touch you then?’

‘If it grows strong enough, sure. It can certainly move things around.’

Penny shivered. ‘That’s horrible,’ she whispered.

‘Ghosts are fine,’ George continued. ‘Ghosts are
brilliant
compared to phantoms.’

The School Master

Edmund Coleman hadn’t been a teacher for long, but he already knew that he wasn’t very good at it. After serving in the army during the Great War and trying a few clerking jobs, he had managed a few years at a grammar school in Pewsey, but the boys didn’t like him and he didn’t like them much either. The only reason he had taken the job was because he needed the money to look after his brother, who had been blinded by mustard gas ten years earlier, in 1915.

In spite of his lack of enthusiasm for the job, when Coleman was offered a post at Shiverton Hall, a boys’ boarding school that had just opened, he grudgingly accepted it because the pay was good and the holidays were long. He left his brother in the care of their mother and arrived on the doorstep of Shiverton with a grim face and a heavy heart.

The headmaster had inherited the house from an unknown relative and transformed the hall into a charitable school for boys whose fathers had been killed in action. He was a kind and enthusiastic man whose indefatigable energy made Coleman feel exhausted and cranky just by looking at him. Coleman marvelled that anyone who had inherited such a monstrous eyesore as Shiverton Hall could be so unfailingly good-tempered, and comforted himself with the fact that the headmaster wouldn’t be quite so happy after receiving the first heating bill.

The boys looked as though they’d been through the mill, Coleman thought; sickly, whey-faced creatures who cried at the merest hint of a lashing. They didn’t like him any more than his last pupils had, and he heard his nickname whispered behind small hands in his classroom:
Cruelman
. He wrote to his brother, complaining of the food, the cold, the other teachers, the boys’ insolence. His brother, a much kinder, more patient man than he, wrote back (their mother transcribing his letters) reassuring him that things would improve and reminding him that boys tended to be kinder when they themselves were treated with kindness. Coleman screwed up these letters and threw them on the fire.
He
wasn’t spared the rod at school and
he
had turned out all right, he said to anyone who would listen in the staff room.

During Coleman’s second term, the music master took ill and, being able to play the organ a little, Coleman was asked to conduct the choir. Coleman accepted reluctantly; he did not like music, and he particularly abhorred hymns. In the trenches during the war, the men had sung hymns to boost morale, and the very sound of them dragged Coleman back into the mud and the darkness. He had successfully steered clear of the chapel every Sunday morning thus far, in order to avoid the sound of the hymns, and now he would be forced to listen to them three times a week.

There was one, a hymn that the men had been singing when a sudden rain of artillery had ripped most of them to pieces, that Coleman dreaded hearing:
Nearer, My God, to Thee
. The lyrics, with their strange combination of joy, resignation and fear, were enough for Coleman to shakily reach for a glass of brandy and knock it back in one. In his diary he recorded that he had terrible nightmares of the dead men reaching out from beneath his bed, singing it.

Coleman stuck to safer tunes in choir practice and services and, to his great surprise, almost began to enjoy his new post. When the boys were singing, they seemed rejuvenated, happy, and the atmosphere was contagious. Coleman laid down his well-worn cane, and began to heed his brother’s advice, praising the boys instead of punishing them. His students started to look forward to his lessons, and he even tried out a few jokes as the summer term drew to a close.

Coleman’s diary, once a dark and confused scrawl of anxiety, filled up with hopes and dreams, and talk of a rather pretty schoolmistress at the nearest girls’ school. To his brother he admitted that he had been quite an embittered soul after the war, but that the feelings of bitterness were beginning to fade, and that he looked forward to starting a new year as a humbler, more patient man. The music master, his illness more protracted than had been expected, retired, and Coleman was offered his job for the next year.

One evening in the following term, Coleman was locking up the chapel after one of his choir rehearsals; they had been practising Christmas carols and a new arrangement by Coleman himself, of which he was most proud. Coleman was whistling the tune merrily as he stuffed his keys in his pocket, when he heard a noise coming from within the chapel. It was the sound of the organ, muffled and quiet through the door. Coleman knew the melody from its first note, that plaintive, mournful strain that turned his blood to ice. He was certain that all of the pupils had left the chapel, that he had been quite alone in there for fifteen minutes as he gathered up the hymn sheets, but he supposed that one of the boys must have hung back to play a trick on him. Coleman was shaking with indignation, his old wartime fear replaced with anger as he fumbled with the chapel lock. His fingers already itched for the cane, his fragile peace of mind shattered in an instant. Coleman flung the door open, puce with fury.

‘Who is that?’ he yelled, expecting to see one of his boys sniggering on the organ stool.

No one was there, and the music had stopped, although the last wheezing note still lingered in the chapel air. Coleman looked between the pews, beneath the altar, behind the curtains in the vestry, but still he could find no one. They must have used some escape route, he thought; the boys knew the school’s secret passages far better than the masters, and there must be some door unknown to him that he had overlooked. Coleman’s anger intensified – he had wanted the immediate satisfaction of punishing whoever was responsible, but now he stood, alone and sweating, and a little unnerved too.

At the next choir rehearsal he shouted at the boys, reducing a few of the younger ones to tears, but they refused to identify the guilty party. He beat each boy soundly, threatening them with expulsion, but still no one would admit to the trick. The rehearsals became a strain; Coleman no longer trusted his boys, and they feared him, and the singing became feeble and tuneless.

After one particularly dismal practice, Coleman dismissed the boys early, and they trudged out, shooting looks of hurt and disappointment back at him. When the door closed behind the last boy, Coleman sighed and began to go over the new arrangement of
In the Bleak Midwinter
. He had been playing for a few minutes when he became aware of something odd: someone was singing along to his organ playing, but it was not the high, clear voice of a boy. It was the low, hoarse voice of a man.

Coleman stopped playing and turned quickly, but he was once again confronted by silence and thin air. This time he didn’t want to search the chapel, realising with dread that he dared not for fear of what he might find. He hastily left, scattering sheets of music behind him.

Coleman’s nightmares returned, the injured comrades with their long, twisted fingernails and rotting flesh after so many years dead, that dreaded hymn crashing away in the background. His diary was no longer filled with the pretty schoolmistress and pride at the boys’ progress, but with these men who loomed over him the moment he closed his eyes.

It was Coleman’s brother who made the suggestion. He believed that Coleman had become fixated on this hymn and that the only way of exorcising the inexplicable hold it had over him would be to, as he put it, ‘face the music – as it were’ and play out the hymn in its entirety. Coleman loathed the idea, but he realised that something must be done. The headmaster had already suggested a period of leave so that Coleman might ‘rest his nerves
’
, and the boys and teachers had surely noticed how much weight he had lost, and how patchy and thin his beard had become.

Coleman chose a night in mid-December. He would rather have done it during the day, but the chapel was open to the boys and teachers and was rarely empty during daylight hours. As the time approached his nerves jangled. He was hopeful that his brother would be proved right, but what if it did not work? Would he be forever sleepless and terrified?

He opened the chapel door showing more confidence than he felt and strode down the aisle with some bravado, flipping the back of his gown boldly over the organ stool. He placed the music on the stand, though he didn’t need it; the fat, black notes were already clustered in his head like an infestation of lice. He stretched his fingers and began to play. It took a few false starts to get going, for he was hesitant and nervous and this made his hands move clumsily over the keys, but soon his years of experience triumphed and he was playing, if not well, then easily.

As Coleman approached the end of the dreaded hymn, he became aware of some movement behind him, but he was determined to finish. He feared that if he stopped midway it would have all been for nothing. There was the sound of footsteps, not only among the pillars but also above his head in the chapel gallery. Coleman squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his fingers to continue, reminding himself forcefully that it was just his imagination. The piece was over, and Coleman slumped over the keys, gasping, as though he had just completed a great feat of physical strength.

The first voice began to sing, as Coleman had known it would. It was joined by another and then another, until the chapel was filled with the ghostly noise. The hymn didn’t sound hopeful, as it had in the trenches, but instead had a quality of accusation. It was too loud, and too slow. Coleman willed the hymn to stop, but as soon as it finished it started up again, even more loudly than before.

There were a dozen of them at Coleman’s first, horrified glance, scattered around the chapel, shuddering and twitching towards him. One soldier’s eye hung out of its socket against the wasted, grey flesh of his cheek; another’s arms had been blown apart, revealing the mangled bones and tendons; one’s mouth had been ripped, and as he sang his jaw dangled gruesomely; yet another had lost his legs, and he dragged himself bloodily along the floor towards Coleman. All of them had long, ragged fingernails, yellow and opaque, and sharp as knives.

The boy who found him early the next morning had to be taken away from the school. The only explanation that the police could come up with was that a wild animal must have got into the chapel somehow, for Coleman was covered head to foot in deep clawmarks, and his clothes had been shredded to tatters. The only thing about his person that remained untouched, apart from a few drops of blood, was a hymn sheet clutched in his mutilated hand.