Shiverton Hall, the Creeper (7 page)

‘She is,’ Arthur replied.

‘Is she still as grim as ever? Why on earth that woman wanted to teach at a school, I’ll never know. Hates children!’

‘She certainly doesn’t like me,’ Arthur agreed.

‘Oh, she doesn’t like anyone. I wouldn’t worry about it. Cake?’

Soon Arthur and Mrs Todd were chatting like old friends. Mrs Todd had been an actress, and her mantelpiece was filled with photographs of her as a young woman.

‘Absolutely gorgeous, wasn’t I?’ she said, looking wistfully at a black and white photo of herself dressed as an Egyptian queen. ‘Ah, to be young.’

She turned her mascara-caked eyes to Arthur. ‘Tell me about yourself, Albert. Tell me about school. Do you have a girlfriend? Boyfriend?’

‘Er . . .
girlfriend
,’ Arthur stressed. ‘No, I don’t. The last girl I liked turned out to be . . . well, a bit of a monster.’

‘Oh, there are a lot of monsters at Shiverton Hall,’ Mrs Todd said with a shudder. ‘Haven’t been to that place for years – gives me the creeps.’

‘It can be pretty creepy,’ Arthur admitted.

‘You know an acquaintance of mine, an author, went there to write a book once.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘An awful business,’ she said quietly.

‘What happened?’ Arthur asked.

‘I probably shouldn’t . . .’ Mrs Todd replied. ‘It’s not a very nice story.’

‘I have a friend who would kill me if he knew I’d passed up an opportunity to hear a Shiverton story,’ Arthur said.

‘Well, all right,’ Mrs Todd said, clearly thrilled to have the opportunity to perform. ‘Maybe just this once. You’re not easily frightened, are you?’

Payment Please

Antony Richmond was a genius. Everyone agreed. His first book,
Under Her Feet
, was published when he was only nineteen, and he had become an overnight sensation in 1950s London.
Under Her Feet
was swiftly followed by
Ladybird
, another hit that took America by storm and made him tremendously rich. But, as with many young men who have seen success too early, Antony Richmond panicked. Every time he sat down to write, he froze. His hand would cramp around his pen and his mind would turn as white and empty as the page in front of him. Soon a year became two, and two became five, and the literary circles in London began to joke about him. A bout of writer’s block became ‘having an Antony Richmond’, and even Richmond’s publisher was beginning to lose patience with him.

Richmond decided that he needed to get out of London, away from his sneering so-called friends and the flashy flat he had bought with his ever-diminishing
Ladybird
fortune. He chose a place called Deia, a small village on the Spanish island of Majorca. Many beautiful stories had been written about the place and Richmond felt that a bit of warmth in his bones would be just the thing to unblock the ink in his pen.

He took a small, spartan house on a hill, overlooking the glittering sea and the honey-coloured village, and spent his days wandering around the hillside, jotting little notes in a book and drinking wine in the local bar. He had tried to write a few sentences sitting at his desk with the cool breeze blowing the muslin curtains romantically about him, but no matter how glorious the setting, he could not think of a single thing to write.

At his wits’ end, and with the summer turning into a drizzly autumn, Richmond started to pack up his things. He would have to get a job teaching at some provincial university, he thought miserably, and eke out the rest of his life as a punchline, occasionally signing tatty paperbacks for old ladies on trains.

As he kicked down the dusty Majorcan street for the last time, there was a rumble in the sky, and soon he was in the thick of a deluge of biblical proportions. He ran for cover and found himself in a cluttered antiques shop that smelled thickly of untreated leather. The shop mostly seemed to be selling broken junk: puppets with their strings cut, chessboards with missing pieces, a doll’s house that looked as though a terrible massacre had occurred inside it. Richmond noticed a small, portly woman watching him from the back of the shop.

‘
Hola
,’ Richmond said, tipping his hat to her. The lady shrank back further into the shadows. Richmond looked outside; the rain showed no sign of abating. He wondered how long he could politely stay in the shop without being obliged to buy something. The woman glared at him from behind a broken chandelier.

He sighed and looked around for some small knick-knack that he could buy as a token. He had just picked up a hideous, decorative owl when something caught his eye. Just behind the doll’s house was a cobwebbed, filthy typewriter. Richmond considered himself something of an aficionado of the machines and had quite a collection of them at home. Even in its obviously poor condition, Richmond could tell that this one was a beauty. He had not seen the make before –
Zezia
, it read, in curling silver letters above the keyboard. The body of the typewriter seemed to be carved out of some black onyx-like stone and the keys were mother-of-pearl. Richmond blew the cobwebs from it and marvelled for a moment. He felt the collector’s thrill, the clammy palms, the racing pulse. He knew that he must have it, and he was determined to get it at a good price. This local woman clearly had no idea what a treasure she was sitting on, and from the way this masterpiece had been left to rot she clearly didn’t deserve to know.

Richmond beckoned to her. ‘Excuse me,’ he said as calmly as he could. ‘I’ll give you one hundred pesetas for it.’

The woman looked blankly at him.

‘This –’ he pointed at the typewriter – ‘for this.’ He showed her the money.

The lady shook her head vigorously.

‘All right, two hundred,’ he said, knowing it would still be a steal at a thousand.

‘No,’ the lady said.

‘Fine,’ Richmond replied. ‘What do you want for it?’

‘Not for sale,’ the woman said, in hesitant English.

‘Not for sale?’ Richmond said incredulously. ‘Then why the devil is it on display in your shop?’

At that moment Richmond had never wanted to own anything so much in his life. The feeling gripped him like a fever. He was sure that if this woman would not let him buy it from her, he would bash her over the head with it and run.

The woman seemed to notice the change in Richmond and shrugged.

‘Five hundred,’ she said.

‘All right,’ Richmond said, shakily removing the notes from his wallet, glad that the episode hadn’t come to violence after all.

The rain had passed, and Richmond left the shop as quickly as he could, gripping the typewriter tightly and feeling dizzy with adrenalin. He ran up to his villa, stepped over his packed bags and put the typewriter on the desk.

Richmond typed the rest of that afternoon, all night and all of the following day. He missed his boat back to England. He wrote until his fingertips were numb and he was faint from exhaustion. Finally, a week later, with the first few chapters done, he fell into bed and into a heavy, black sleep.

He awoke in the middle of the night, to the sound of tapping keys. He lurched out of bed and over to his desk.

His typewriter was typing quite unaided.

Richmond picked it up, turned it over and peered underneath. It must be some sort of trick, he thought. A joke typewriter that typed nonsense as a party trick. He tore out the page and read it. It was his voice – there was no question of that; the turn of phrase, the imagery, all exactly as he would have written them – picking up the story from where he had left it.

Richmond reeled back. Had he gone mad? Was he still asleep? A stub of his toe against his travelling trunk convinced him that he was indeed awake. Mad, then, he thought desperately and sat down on his bed.

The typewriter continued typing all through the night, with Richmond tearing out the pages as it went. This was good, he realised, extraordinarily good, better than anything he had written before. Then the fear started to give way to another emotion: excitement. This would be his masterpiece. This book would make him a millionaire. So what if its creation was supernatural? Wasn’t every creative endeavour magical in some way?

He watched as the typewriter tapped steadily away, reading each page with mounting exhilaration. The plot spun its way to a climax that had Richmond weeping with joy, and a final sentence that would have the authors of London on their knees with envy.

Richmond sat back and giggled as the typewriter typed out
THE END
with a rhythmic flourish, then the keys were still. He gathered up the pages and tied them with a green, velvet ribbon.
The Shipping Forecast
by Antony Richmond
adorned the title page in the typewriter’s sinuous font.

As Richmond was slotting the manuscript into his leather case, the typewriter let out a little burst and then stopped again. Richmond approached it.

In the middle of a new page, in capital letters, was written:

PAYMENT PLEASE

Richmond studied it, confused. Payment? What did it mean? There was no coin slot, he was sure of that. Perhaps it was Zezia’s little joke, or the maker’s, at any rate. Richmond added the paper to his case and promptly forgot it, swept away by fantasies of his new life as Britain’s greatest living novelist. That show-off Graham Greene would be ‘green’ indeed, Richmond chuckled to himself.

Richmond travelled back to London, with the typewriter hugged close to his chest, refusing to put it down even at mealtimes. He didn’t mind the stares. He thought the whole thing lent him an appropriately writerly eccentricity.

The response in London was better than that of his wildest dreams. His publisher suffered a heart attack while reading it and had to be replaced by his son, a news story that created a frenzy before the book had even been printed. And though most of his old writer friends stopped speaking to him because they were so sick with jealousy, Richmond didn’t care, because his new friends were movie stars and jazz singers and members of the royal family.

But one night, following an enormous party at his new house in Eaton Square, Richmond awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of typing. Bleary-eyed, he walked over to Zezia and pulled out the paper.

PAYMENT PLEASE

Richmond looked at the familiar words and for the first time in a while, he felt rather queasy. He screwed up the page and eventually fell back to sleep.

Richmond’s publisher began to ask what the next book would be, as did his new friends, and although he teased them that it was going to be his greatest work yet, Richmond hadn’t a single idea of where to begin. The old fog had descended on his brain, and the Zezia typewriter hadn’t typed a thing except
PAYMENT PLEASE
since it had finished
The Shipping Forecast
.

If he was honest with himself, the whole thing was beginning to make him uneasy. Then one night he awoke to the sound of the keys hammering even more loudly than usual. He had moved the typewriter to his dressing room, but the pounding still carried through the door. He approached Zezia tentatively; there were leaves of paper all over the floor, each of them covered in the same two words:

PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE PAYMENT PLEASE

Richmond had trouble sleeping after that.

His publisher insisted that he see some of Richmond’s new book, and Richmond was forced to admit that he had nothing to show.

‘Right,’ said his publisher, ‘I’m sending you away. You’ve been living it up in London for far too long. You need to clear your head.’

Richmond’s publisher suggested a place called Shiverton Hall. He had been at school there and guaranteed that there wasn’t a place on earth further away from everything. He’d have a word with the headmaster, and see if Richmond couldn’t stay there while the place was empty for the summer holidays.

‘No luxury. No distractions. Two months should break the back of it, wouldn’t you say?’ the publisher said.

Richmond couldn’t argue. Perhaps he did need to be away from it all. Maybe Zezia would be better behaved when he had time to spend with her.

He took a train to Grimstone station, and the school groundsman picked him up in an ancient automobile.

‘The headmaster’s on holiday in Exmoor,’ the groundsman said as the car pulled up to the menacing bulk of Shiverton Hall. ‘He’ll be back in two weeks. If you need me I’m in the groundsman’s cottage, about a mile from here.’