The Ghost Hunters (49 page)

‘It begins a new word again, immediately beneath. Here, you can quite clearly discern the letter “E”. You interpreted the two letters that followed as “T”. I don’t think that’s right, They look more like the double letter “I”. Which would spell ‘WELL”.

He nodded and blinked.

‘You thought the last letter was “T”. But look at the odd way the base of the letter is drawn.’ I stared at him. ‘It’s not a “T”, Harry, it’s a “K”.’

I reached for a pencil and paper and frantically scribbled the words out:

WELL TANK BOTTOM ME.

Price stared down in awe at the newly deciphered message, and then looked at me in wonder, shaking his head and clasping his hands together. ‘We are playing different chords now, Sarah, but we are still making music. That’s brilliant! Simply brilliant!’

I smiled with pride. Now we knew where to dig. ‘The bones of the murdered nun are beneath the Rectory, in the well in the cellar. The prophecy said “you must go if you want proof”. Well, let’s go!’

Price was looking at me uncertainly. ‘You’re suggesting we ask permission from the Queen Anne’s Bounty
²
to dig the place
up on the basis of some wall writings and automatic writing gleaned from seances.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. The sooner we do so, the better.’

I could see he was uncertain about the idea.

‘Harry,’ I said, lowering my voice, ‘you owe me this.’

‘I had forgotten how stubborn you are, Sarah.’

I had to admit that in this affair, I was. And I would not apologise for it; I was driven by a conviction to know the truth, to find reassurance that I could still escape the dark fate that Marianne Foyster had foretold. Whoever reads this will wonder, I am sure, about the secret I carried that connected me with that house. I wondered about it often too, and I knew I had to lay it to rest.

‘I won’t take no for an answer. Come on, Harry! Why knock on a door you’re not prepared to enter?’

‘Very well,’ said Price, getting to his feet. ‘Then the Rectory will yield its secrets after all. Come, Sarah, let’s begin!’

I sprang up to follow him. As I passed the mirror on my office wall my eye was caught by a gleam of light reflected in its glass. But when I turned and looked, I saw only my reflection and my eyes, wide with alarm, staring back at me.

‘What is it?’ asked Price. ‘What did you see?’

I had wanted to tell him oh so badly. That he might understand at last. I thought in that moment that perhaps I could explain and offer us both some release from perpetual confusion. This haunting. I wanted to take it all back, to relinquish the hurt, to return to that night when Mother and I had walked together to his Laboratory, back when I could have chosen another path: worked for a charity or become a teacher. I tried to remember what life had been like before Harry Price but couldn’t.

‘Sarah, what did you see?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Really, it’s nothing.’

Of course that was a lie, another secret I kept from him. For how could I have admitted what I thought I had seen in the mirror? A chain glinting in the lamplight hanging like a noose around my neck.

Notes

1
‘The Haunting of Borley Rectory. Private and Confidential Report’.

2
The Queen Anne’s Bounty was a fund established in 1704 to augment the incomes of the poorer clergy of the Church of England. The bounty was funded by the tax on the incomes of all English clergy, which was paid to the Pope until the Reformation, and thereafter to the Crown.

Just six weeks before the Second World War engulfed Europe a party was held in the gardens of the ruined Rectory to raise funds for the restoration of Borley Church. Reverend Alfred Henning had suggested, rather cleverly I thought, to theme the event as a ‘psychic fete’ with attractions including a guided tour of the ruined building by its new owner, one Captain Gregson, who had purchased the building when Price’s tenancy had ended. Captain Gregson was the last owner of Borley Rectory and had moved into the house on 16 December 1938, just two months before the fire.
¹

On Wednesday 21 June 1939, I took a day’s holiday and travelled with Price back to that strange and out-of-the-way place along with twenty-five members of the London Ghost Club. I was curious to see the present state of the dilapidated Rectory for myself of course, but more importantly I wanted to ascertain the viability of excavating the cellars before the whole area was cleared and the bricks taken away. Anyway, I reminded myself, the event might actually be fun.

However, I regretted attending from the instant I set foot in the Rectory grounds, for as I wandered around the tangled
garden beneath the heat of that dusty afternoon, passing the games of skittles, the coconut shy and the white elephant stall, my mind soon returned to the many events I had witnessed there ten years before and I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable and detached, as though I was viewing the games of darts and the pig-pelting competition along the Nun’s Walk through a pane of glass. I couldn’t even stand still long enough to participate in the other ladies’ insipid conversations. Their words were lost in the rustling summer breeze, drifting around my head as intangible as smoke. I smiled, but had no idea why, because none of this seemed quite real to me. It was deceptively perfect, for it all too thinly disguised the truth.

War was coming.

Everyone knew it, though few in this picturesque setting of English gentility wanted to know. Children played, women laughed, men talked lightly of their horses and of politics and of how war on the scale they had witnessed before ‘could never happen again’. But their eyes showed their true fear, and the laughter was hollow. Here was an England clinging to the last vestiges of hope that would soon crumble, like the old Rectory looming over us.

After a while Mrs Butler, wife of the then Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, took to the wooden stage to deliver her welcome speech. Behind her, Borley Rectory had been reduced to little more than an abandoned shell of blackened bricks. Its windows gaped where the glass had shattered and blown out from the heat; its high roof was gone, collapsed inwards upon the rubble below; no doors remained, only deep spaces leading nowhere.

My observations quickly gave way to reflection. Had I never come here in 1929, I might never have learned of this place’s
secrets or been touched by the malevolent, hateful presence that dwelt within these grounds – a spirit intent on observing and punishing deceit. I wished I could go back. I wished I could protect my mother from the hatred and bitterness and seething malice that I suspected was the cause of her long drawn-out suffering.

On her best days she answered questions perfectly coherently. Those were moments to savour, moments to remember during the other, darker times, when confusion reigned in her fluttering, darting eyes.

Standing in the Rectory grounds that summer afternoon, I rubbed my bare arms against an unnerving chill that shuddered through me. In my head I heard peculiar sounds from Mother’s house, which ran now like a soundtrack through my life:

Tap-tap-scratch; tap-tap, scratch.

‘Sarah, come and meet Captain Gregson.’ Price’s voice made me turn. Before me was a tall, robust man in his fifties. ‘Shall we go over here?’ Price suggested, and we walked away from the light-spirited garden function towards the old summerhouse at the far end of the grounds. I looked back at the Rectory and at a cloud of birds swooping slowly around one of its crumbling chimneys. Swooping
too
slowly, as if the sky was thickening. And then, impossibly, the summer’s day was blowing away, dissolving. The years turning back as darkness gathered and folded around me. I spun round to face the garden, seeking the reassuring presence of the other guests; but there was nothing. Every soul had vanished.

I blinked.

Once.

Twice.

Opened my eyes.

Before me now, was the Rectory – but not my Rectory. This was the Rectory as it had once been – clean, intact windows, roof unbroken, red brickwork glowing softly, solidly, under the moon. And at the front of the house a window that hadn’t been there before.

I scanned the gardens, the path skirting their perimeter, and through the darkness I thought I saw a gliding figure.
This is a dream
, I thought.
This can’t be real
.

Suddenly the air was thick with heat and crackling sounds. A dreadful scent of smoking wood brought tears to my eyes.

Time tilted, balanced itself. I was back in the garden. In my time. How far into the past had I gone? To Price and the Reverend Henning, I had travelled no distance at all. Their conversation babbled in mid-flow, as it had when I had left them. I had been with them, I had gone, I had come back. And like the Rectory, I had been here all the time.

Looking towards the Nun’s Walk, I asked Captain Gregson for his opinion on the matter of the haunting. He had been living in the cottage adjoining the Rectory, which had escaped the fire, for longer than a year. Did he believe the tales that went with the house?

‘What I believe is neither here nor there,’ he answered. ‘It’s what I know that matters. And I
am
obliged to trust the evidence of my own eyes and ears.’

He told us then how his two cocker spaniels refused to enter the Rectory courtyard, how each went mad with terror at something they sensed beyond the threshold.

‘What is the explanation? Who knows. I don’t. But I have a feeling you might …’

It seemed the right time to make our request. We wanted, I said, to excavate the ruined grounds as soon as possible but
would need men and tools to assist us. Would the captain agree to help us?

He gave a short shrug. ‘Well, it’s an unusual request, Miss Grey, but I don’t see the harm. Yes, why not? Might be difficult though, what with the prospect of another war.’

Price raised a doubtful eyebrow. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m not sure that things in Germany are as bad as they were. I know many people who have just returned from holidays in Germany and who report that everything appears normal and they were treated kindly.’

‘You approve of the German culture, Mr Price?’ The captain seemed surprised.

‘Indeed I do,’ Price replied, insensitively I thought, given that it was at the hands of a German soldier that my father had perished. ‘I want, once more, to dine on the terrace of the Molkenkur restaurant. I have never taken you there, Sarah, but one day I will. From that marvellous elevation one can look out over the town of Heidelberg and its castle, like a collection of model houses hundreds of feet below. I want to observe the peasants making quaint cuckoo clocks on the doorsteps of their Black Forest homes.’ He paused and then said, ‘I am sure that Mr Hitler is a reasonable man. Let us hope, even at this eleventh hour, some means will be found to adjust the differences between our two countries.’

I had never seen him so passionate about a subject other than the supernormal. Had the comment any meaning? It certainly struck me as odd.

‘I will do my best to help you,’ said Captain Gregson, ‘but it won’t happen quickly.’ He promised to clear the arrangements with Reverend Henning, whom he was sure would be compliant, and to let us know when would be convenient. Then he returned
to his guests, Price following in his wake like an eager child as he prepared to take to the stage to regale the punters with stories of spirits and table-rapping.

I lingered a while longer by the summerhouse and closed my eyes, breathing in the sweet scent of honeysuckle. A warm breeze carried music from the fete upon its breath and somewhere, beyond the blackened ruins of the Rectory, the thin cry of a child.

Note

1
Gregson paid £500 for the property, which was initially valued by the Halstead estate agent Stanley Moger at £450. Mr Moger visited the house shortly after Price had left. The inventory he prepared for the Ecclesiastical Commission on 26 May 1938 describes the interior of the house as ‘… roaming and quite out-of date, requiring much expenditure in refitting and modernising. The decorative condition is decidedly old and of cold appearance.’ Elsewhere in the document Mr Moger records the building’s reputation thus: ‘LOCAL RUMOUR. The Rectory is supposed to be HAUNTED, and a few years ago was the Hunting Ground of many hundreds of Spiritualists and Inquisitive persons, in fact, so many visited the site that the Police had to handle the matter. This, as you may imagine, is a considerable detriment to selling, as many view but turn away on this account.’

The sun was burning a fierce orange high over the lonely Essex fields when the first pickaxe broke through the floor of the Rectory cellars. I hoped I would feel some relief once we started digging but the scene was tense and I felt unwell, and had increasingly for some months. The scar from my operation ached. I put it down to agitation that it had taken so long to be granted access to the Rectory site. Three years! The war, as predicted, had rather interrupted our plans.

Price strode around the site as if he owned it, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows as he directed each of us to do this or that. My own task was simple: I was to take detailed notes on the proceedings so that Price could draw on these later as he compiled his second monograph of the case – a work he had already decided would be titled
The End of Borley Rectory
.

He called down earnestly to the man digging, ‘Do you see anything?’

‘No, sir, not yet.’

Price’s strained heart prevented him from doing any of the digging himself, so Reverend Henning had enlisted the assistance of a local gentleman called Ted Jackson. He was a tall,
bespectacled man whose thin frame did not reassure me that he would be equal to the task, but we were grateful for his willingness to help.

‘She’s been seen again, you know,’ a voice behind me said quietly. It was Reverend Henning.

‘You mean the nun?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Just recently, out there.’ He looked past a belt of elm trees toward the lane which separated the Rectory grounds from the churchyard. ‘By a doctor this time. Reckons he saw a figure all in black robes, bending down at the side of the road. Skin like leather, he said, with just black holes for eyes.’