‘Eve!’ she called out. ‘It’s Lili Peel. Please come to the door!’
Certain it wouldn’t work but trying it anyway, she turned the old painted-black doorknob and was surprised when the wind blew the door inwards.
Her matted hair flat against her head, its ends dripping raindrops onto the floor, Lili entered Crickley Hall. The wind blustered in behind her, bringing rain with it. She quickly pushed the front door shut, fighting the wind to do so.
With the door closed and the noise of the storm muffled, the psychic turned to face the grand hall again. She had half expected to be overwhelmed by invisible presences like the first time she had arrived here, but there was nothing – she sensed no overwrought spirits, nor anything bad oppressing the atmosphere. The vast, stone-flagged room that felt like some self-aggrandizing billionaire’s mausoleum was devoid of unearthly energies. But there were puddles of water, some as big as pools, scattered around the floor. Lili regarded them curiously, then movement caught her eye.
‘Lili?’ she heard a surprised voice say.
Looking up, the psychic saw Eve Caleigh peering down at her from the hall’s balcony. She had obviously emerged from a room along the landing. Lili heard Eve draw in a sharp breath when she saw the puddles that lay around the ground floor. Eve quickly went to the stairs and hurried down them, her face showing concern. She avoided the water as she came towards Lili.
‘It must be the rain,’ Eve said quietly, as if to herself rather than to the psychic.
Lili saw the usual aura of sadness round Eve, but now its greyness was deeper and more lifeless.
‘Sorry, Lili,’ Eve apologized as she drew near. ‘I heard the doorbell, but I was settling Cally into her bed. I’m hoping she’ll drift off to sleep soon.’
Lili looked at the other woman with pity. ‘Eve . . . your son. I’m so sorry.’
Eve stammered. ‘You – you know? You sensed that?’
‘He’s at rest now. Nothing more can ever harm him.’
She thought that Eve might crumble, might break down in tears, but the bereaved mother was strong and regained her composure. Lili was relieved.
‘What brought you here tonight?’ Eve asked detachedly. ‘The weather. . .’
‘I couldn’t let the storm prevent me from coming. It’s important that I’m here. I think you’ll need me.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Eve gave a small shake of her head.
‘I can feel it now. The house felt empty a few moments ago, but now I sense something coming through, as if they’ve been waiting for me.’
‘The children?’ Eve stared intently into Lili’s green eyes. ‘I felt something impending all morning, but I thought it was because of Cam.’
‘No. I told you, your little boy is at peace. What’s going to happen tonight is nothing to do with him.’
‘That’s why you came here? The children brought you here?’
‘They called me. I had to come.’
A week ago, she might have thought the psychic’s words were self-delusional, but everything had changed for Eve now. Eve believed Crickley Hall was being haunted by the ghosts of children who had once lived in the house. But they were not alone; there was a darker entity here also. Eve herself sensed this.
Her question was in earnest. ‘Why do you think they’ve called you, Lili? There has to be a reason, doesn’t there? The hauntings must have a purpose.’
But in answer, the psychic merely closed her eyes and mentally reached out to the orphans who had died in Crickley Hall. Nothing happened. She could not visualize them. Yet the first time she had entered the house she had almost been overwhelmed by a great pressure, an emotional barrage that had made her feel faint. She knew there was contact between herself and the spirits here – she sensed their unhappiness, their pleadings – but they had not come through clearly. Something or someone was holding them back. Something or someone they feared. And now she could sense it herself.
Lili’s eyes snapped open as if she had been physically stunned. Whatever it was, it was feeding off the psychic energy of the house’s occupants, including her own. She could feel strength draining from her.
‘It’s more powerful than them,’ she murmured, more to herself than Eve.
Eve touched her rm. ‘Lili, are you all right?’
But the psychic looked puzzled rather than weakened.
‘There’s something very wrong.’ Lili looked around, her eyes wide. She looked at the cellar door, which was ajar; she looked up at the L-shaped landing, which was empty. She looked at the broad, imposing staircase and she shuddered.
‘Sometimes stairways act like a vortex for spirits,’ she told Eve. ‘It’s because there’s so much energy there with people using it all the time, and the spirits are drawn to that energy. There’s something there but I can’t tell what it is.’
Lightning flashed outside the tall window over the stairs, blanching each separate pane of glass. Thunder seemed to roll along the roof itself.
‘Eve!’ Lili suddenly said, making the other woman start. ‘D’you have anything that belonged to the children? The children who died here, I mean. Anything that might have been left behind years ago.’
Eve shook her head and was about to say no, when she remembered the items Gabe had found hidden behind the landing cupboard. The Punishment Book, the thin, supple cane – the photograph of the Cribbens with the children!
‘Wait here,’ she told the psychic and dashed into the kitchen, leaving Lili alone in the cavernous hall.
Lili took a moment to study the pools that spread across the floor. There were no drips from the high ceiling that she could see, and how could the water seep through the floor if there was a cellar below? Maybe there was a layer of earth or a cavity between floor and cellar ceiling that rainwater could have soaked into from underneath the property’s solid walls.
Eve hurried back from the kitchen clutching a photograph in one hand and a child’s colourful toy, an old-fashioned spinning top, in the other. She showed Lili the spinning top first.
‘It’s a toy Gabe and I found in a locked storeroom next to the children’s dormitory. There was a lot of stuff in there – more toys and school things. All the toys were old but looked new. We think they’d never been used.’ Eve eyed the spinning top nervously. ‘Once we’d wiped off the dust, it came up like this. When I was alone last Monday, I spun it and saw the ghosts of the children.’
‘You mean you saw their images in the top?’ Lili pointed to the graphics printed on the spinning top’s metal shell.
‘No. I saw real children here, in the hall. Except they weren’t real, they were ghosts. They were dancing in a circle. But Mr Pyke suggested that watching the top spinning – listening to the humming noise it made as it spun fast, seeing the colours turn to white – might have caused me to hallucinate.’
‘Who’s Mr Pyke?’ Lili asked, curious.
‘He came yesterday. He calls himself a ghost-hunter, a psychic investigator, and he convinced Gabe he could prove the house wasn’t haunted. He’s here now, upstairs in the old dormitory arranging his equipment. Loren is with him.’
Eve realized that Pyke and her daughter had been gone a longtime. Mr Pyke may have been charming, but what did they know about him? She began to grow anxious.
The psychic took the toy from Eve and inspected it.
‘Maybe the children did play with it before it was taken away and put in the storeroom.’ Lili lightly ran her fingers over the top’s brightly coloured surface. ‘I can feel a connection with them.’
‘And here’s a photograph Gabe found. It was hidden behind a false wall in a cupboard upstairs.’ Eve proffered the old black-and-white picture.
Lili placed the spinning top on the floor at her feet and accepted the photograph. She felt her heart leap when she held it in her hands, for at last she could see the children who had come to Crickley Hall as evacuees, she could know what they looked like.
She examined each face in turn, beginning with the
back row, frowning once, then moving on. She came to a pretty young woman whom Lili assumed was one of the teachers; there was something infinitely sad in her countenance.
In the middle of the front row of smaller children and seated on chairs were a man and woman of similar features to each other. They both looked hard, mean, and they seemed to regard the camera with hostile suspicion. A disturbing flutter ran through Lili and she quickly looked away.
But her eyes returned to the one child – although he looked more than a child and was certainly older than the others – that she had frowned at before. The boy was grinning, the only person in the photograph to do so, but his eyes did not match the grin. They were sly, mad eyes. Lili sensed it.
She swayed unsteadily and Eve thought the psychic was about to faint again. But Lili caught herself.
Pointing at the grinning boy in the photograph, she said: ‘D’you know anything about him?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ Eve replied. ‘The gardener here has worked for different owners of Crickley Hall for ever, it seems. Percy was even here when the evacuees came down from London to stay. He told us about that particular boy and it was nothing good. The other children didn’t like him, but apparently he was a favourite of the Cribbens. I think his name was Maurice. Maurice something-or-other. Stannard? No, it was Stafford. Maurice Stafford.’
‘I sense bad things about him.’ Lili frowned again and this time it was more deeply, more concentrated. ‘There’s something wrong with him. I think he was very wicked.’
‘He was just a boy,’ Eve said. ‘He was too young to be wicked.’
‘This one was born that way. It wasn’t something he learned. There’s some kind of connection between him and the two adults at the front. You called them the Cribbens – husband and wife?’
‘Brother and sister.’
‘Yes, the likeness is obvious. This boy, Maurice Stafford, he learned evil from those two. I can feel it so strongly. Oh God – ’ the photograph shook in the psychic’s hands – ‘it’s becoming clearer. He did the children great harm.’
She closed her eyes.
‘They’re trying to tell me, the children are trying to speak to me. They’re here. Eve, the children are still in this house. They’ve never left it.’
Her eyes opened.
‘Can’t you sense them?’ she asked Eve.
And Eve could sense something. No, she could hear something. A susurration of whispers. Growing in volume, filling the corners of the hall. She gasped when the colourful top on the floor began to turn slowly.
The sounds were of young voices, all whispering words she could not understand because one overlaid the other, all mixed together so that they were incoherent. But she knew they were frightened voices. The clamour rose, but still only in whispers, and the top spun faster. Eve looked at Lili, confused and mystified.
‘They’re trying so hard,’ said Lili as she gazed in wonder around the vast room. ‘But there’s something preventing them.’ She gave a shiver. ‘There’s another entity here, but it won’t come forward. Not yet.’
The psychic stared down at the spinning top whose colours were beginning to blend, to become murky, and then to become a white blur. A humming sound came from it that was neither musical nor harsh, but which ascended to a steady thrum. And the whisperings now sounded like the soft flurry of distant birds on the wing.
But then a voice, a real voice, a man’s voice, interrupted everything, even though it was just a murmuring coming from the landing above.
The spinning top began to wobble as it slowed down and its humming grew deeper in tone. Colours appeared on its tin surface once again and the dancing figures started to become clearer. Suddenly, the toy lurched, faltered, then fell onto its side to roll away in an arc, coming to a stop behind Eve. The whisperings ceased.
Lili inclined her head, searching for the source of the new voices. Loren came into view from a doorway along the landing, followed by a tall man, and it was his voice they could hear. The girl kept looking round at the man, as if taking in every word he said.
The couple paused and through the balcony’s railings, Lili saw Loren pull open a cupboard door. The man’s voice was strong and clear enough to be understood from below.
‘We’ll comeback to it after I’ve had a word with your mother about the attic. I shouldn’t like anything to be disturbed up there now I’ve set up.’
‘That’s Gordon Pyke,’ Eve told Lili. ‘He’s the investigator.’ Then, as if she had only just noticed: ‘Lili, what happened to those sounds? The whisperings.’
The psychic continued to look up at the two people on the landing, who were now making their way to the stairs.
‘Lili?’
The psychic dropped her eyes to find Eve staring at her. ‘They’ve gone. Something disturbed them. I think they were frightened away.’
‘It was the children, wasn’t it? The orphans who drowned in this place all those years ago.’
‘Yes. Yes, I believe – I’m sure – it was.’
Pyke and Loren were descending the stairs and Lili saw that the man, who had a small goatee beard, was very tall. Something – an intuition – seemed to click in her mind as she watched him, but the thought hadn’t yet made itself apparent. Pyke had left something at the top of the stairs; it was a large suitcase.
Leaving the stairs, the so-called ‘ghost-hunter’ walked round the puddles with Loren. ‘You appear to have been flooded,’ he remarked needlessly as he looked around the hall. He craned his neck to peer up at the ceiling. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find its root cause and then we’ll be able to stop it happening again.’
Something about the man was bothering Lili as he and Loren came towards them. As Pyke approached, she gazed intently into his eyes.
The sensing hit her like a physical blow, almost taking her breath away.
Oh my God! she thought. Then, urgently and aloud: ‘It’s him, Eve! He was the boy in the photograph. The one you called Maurice Stafford.’
68: OBSTRUCTION
Gabe brought the Range Rover to a sliding halt, the bonnet nodding at the leafy fallen tree one foot away.
Hell! This can’t be happening!
Travelling too fast, he had almost smashed into the obstacle that sprawled across the country lane, seeing it only just in time to slam on the brakes. He thanked the Lord for quick reactions and EBA – Emergency Brake Assist. Electronic traction control had helped also, preventing the vehicle from going into a skid.
The Range Rover’s full-beam headlights lit up the blockage and Gabe quickly surveyed it. Lightning stammered and illuminated the scene even more and from where he was sitting he could see that the toppled tree filled the full width of the lane, its branches having crushed the tall hedges on the right, its split trunk creating a solid barrier on his left. Gabe slumped back in his seat in momentary despair and uttered a sound that fully formed would have been a curse. Thunder roared.
Without further hesitation, he pushed open the driver’s door and stepped out into the storm. His eyes narrowed against the driving rain as he pulled up the collar of his reefer jacket and tucked one lapel beneath the other to protect his neck. Closing the door with a thud, he moved towards the high barrier of branches, the vehicle’s headlights helping him assess the damage ahead. He walked to both sides of the lane and found no way round the obstruction. At least, not in the Range Rover.
He was about to climb the grass verge where the shattered tree stump still smouldered, the fire caused by the lightning strike extinguished by the wind-blown rain, when he was distracted by a single light approaching down the lane behind him. As the light drew closer it shone directly into his eyes, dazzling them so he was forced to raise a hand in front of his face.
The voice fought to be heard over the storm. ‘Mr Caleigh? Is that you?’
Gabe blinked and was able to make out a dark figure behind the torchbeam as it was lowered a little.
He raised his own voice. ‘Who’s there?’
/> The torch was dropped even further so that its beam pointed at the ground. By the reflected glare of the Range Rover’s headlights he recognized the approaching figure. The man with the torch wore a storm coat with the hood up over a flat cap.
‘Percy? That you?’
‘Yers, Mr Caleigh,’ came the shouted response. ‘It’s Percy Judd. Had an accident, has yer?’
Gabe could barely comprehend the old gardener’s words over the noise of the gale and pounding rain, but he caught the name all right. He waited for Percy Judd to get closer before speaking again.
‘What the hell you doing out on a night like this, Percy?’
The gardener leaned close to Gabe’s ear.
‘Goin’ to the same place as you, Mr Caleigh. Makin’ my way to Crickley Hall.’
Gabe jerked his head away in surprise. ‘Right now? Why?’
Percy seemed reluctant to explain. He could hardly tell his employer that it was the incessant whining and then howling of a dog had brought him out of his home this stormy night. That and his own very real sense of unease. Worried about the weather, sir,’ he only half lied, again talking directly into Gabe’s ear. ‘It’s flood weather, Mr Caleigh, jus’ like las’ time, them who remembers tell me.’
‘I thought it couldn’t happen again.’
‘Nothin’ can stop the waters pourin’ off the moors, not when it’s been rainin’ fer weeks an’ the storm’s this fierce. It’s the build-up, y’see. All the precautions can only limit the damage, can’t stop the floodin’ itself.’
Great, Gabe thought to himself. Something else to worry about.
‘I tried phonin’ the house,’ Percy went on, ‘but the lines must be down. Couldn’t get nothin’, jus’ a dead line.’
As lightning flashed again, Gabe pointed at the fallen elm. He waited for the thunder to roll away before attempting to speak to the old man again. Percy stood there unbowed by the wind and rain, his back straight, rainwater dribbling from the peak of his flat cap which protruded from the hood.
‘Road’s blocked all the way across,’ Gabe told him. ‘Can’t get round it in the car.’