A Twist of the Knife

  She described a woman, with a grey face, dressed in grey silk crinoline, moving across the atrium – exactly what the old man, Harry Stotting, had described to me.

  I was stunned – and very spooked. Later, after her parents had left, I decided I had to tell Geraldine. She took it in the pragmatic way she had of dealing with most difficult issues in life. ‘You’ve met several mediums in your research – why don’t you ask one of them to come in and see what they find?’

  A few days later, a medium who had helped me a lot during my writing of Possession came to the house, and I took her into the atrium and left her on her own, as she had requested.

  An hour later she came up to my study, and yet again described exactly the woman in grey silk crinoline. She explained the pinpricks of light I kept seeing by telling me I was slightly psychic, so while I was not actually seeing the entire apparition, I was picking up some of its energy.

  I asked her if there was anything I could do about this, and she told me that the apparition was of a deeply disturbed former resident of the house, and that it needed a clergyman to deal with it.

  I felt a tad cynical about her response – but at the same time, I was now feeling deeply uncomfortable in what should have been the sanctuary of my own home. However, there was a vicar I knew who I thought would be able to help.

  At the time he was officially the Vicar of Brighton – but with another hat, he was also the chief exorcist of the Church of England. That wasn’t his actual title, which was the less flaky-sounding Minister of Deliverance. A former monk with a double first from Oxford in psychology, and the son of two medics, he was as far from Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist as you could get. He is a delightful human being, with whom I had become good friends, and still am to this day. He is a modern thinker, a clergyman who has a problem with the biblical concept of God yet still retains an infectious faith.

  Even so, I was a little surprised when he cheerfully entered the atrium, stood still for a couple of minutes, and then loudly and very firmly enunciated into thin air, ‘You may go now!’

  He turned to me and said, ‘You should be fine now.’

  Well, we were, until a mid-June day in 1994. My novel Host, which had been published the previous year by Penguin in hardback, had just been published both on two floppy discs, billed as the world’s first electronic novel, and in paperback. The thick paperback lay on a beautiful antique wooden chest which we kept in the atrium. I always put my latest book there for visitors to see. On this particular sunny morning, I was having breakfast around 7.45 a.m., while Geraldine was upstairs getting ready for work. Suddenly she called down, ‘I can smell burning!’

  I suddenly realized that I could too. I turned around, and to my amazement, the copy of Host, on top of the wooden chest, was on fire!

  I rushed over, grabbed the book, ran to the kitchen sink and threw it in, then turned the taps on to extinguish the flames.

  There was, of course, a perfectly prosaic explanation: close to the book, on the chest, was a round glass paperweight. The hot June morning sun rays had been refracted through it, much the same way that as kids we used to set fire to things by letting the sun’s rays refract through a magnifying glass. But . . . the fact it had happened in this room which had had the apparition in it added a very sinister dimension.

  The above story was only one of the spooky occurrences we had in this otherwise glorious house. The second happened the first weekend we spent there. It was on the Sunday morning and I said hello to our nearest neighbours, who lived in what had, in former days, been the coach house. ‘I just want to ask you,’ the cheery elderly occupant asked, ‘because my wife and I are very curious. Do you have anyone staying with a young baby this weekend?’

  ‘No,’ I told him.

  ‘Ah, must be your ghost again,’ he said, very matter-of-factly.

  It turned out that he, and other neighbours across the narrow lane outside the house, would regularly hear a baby crying. We learned that in the 1920s the drawing room floor had been dug up because of damp and dry rot and the skeleton of a baby had been discovered – perhaps stillborn, or possibly even murdered way back in time.

  In the grounds was a very narrow lake, a quarter of a mile long, and on the far side was a public footpath. During the decade we lived in the house, several residents of the hamlet and of surrounding villages told us how they had been chased off the footpath at dusk by a Roman centurion! To me, this was the least credible of the stories. But in many ways, one of the most credible was the one I was told the day I was collared by another of my neighbours.

  The house used to own many hundreds of surrounding acres. Over time the land was sold off in parcels. Several houses had been built in the 1930s and 1950s along the far side of the lake. One day I was walking Boris along past them when the owner of one – a very down-to-earth factory manager in his mid-fifties – shouted, ‘I wish you would keep your bloody ghosts under control!’

  He then told me, ‘Last Sunday, we held a christening party for my grandson here. At 4 p.m., all the guests had gone and I went and sat in the conservatory to read the Sunday Times. Suddenly the room turned icy and I shivered. I looked up and saw a monk in a cowled hood staring down at me. I thought at first it was one of my relatives playing a prank on me. I stood up and followed it into the kitchen. But he had vanished. The only person in there was my wife, doing the washing-up. There is no door out of the kitchen. She had not seen or heard anything.’

  There was one more very spooky occurrence during our time there. At the front of the house were two sets of classic Georgian bay windows. One was in a spare bedroom, which we called the Blue Room, where we often put up guests, and all the time we lived there, I never felt comfortable entering it. Whenever we went away, we employed a house-sitter. On each occasion, when we returned home the house-sitter would have moved out of this room, giving a lame excuse about not liking the colour, or the morning sun, and slept somewhere else in the house.

  As a postscript, I should add something of the house’s history. For much of the twentieth century it was owned by the Stobart family, the most famous member of which, Tom Stobart OBE, was a photographer, zoologist and author. A true adventurer, he was the cameraman who climbed Everest with Hunt and Hillary and took the photos of their ascent, was subsequently shot in the knee in Ethiopia, and tragically died far too young from a heart attack at the local railway station, Hassocks. One member of the family was – reputedly – a strange lady, who became a man-hating lesbian and subjected Tom’s sister Anne, who we befriended in the years before she died from a stroke, to such cruelty as a child she was never able to live a normal life or form normal relationships. Anne told us one day that this relative used to strap her hands to the side of the bed when she was a child to prevent her, should she be tempted, from touching herself.

  Was she the grey lady in the atrium?

  During the Second World War, the house was used to billet Canadian soldiers. After the war, during the second half of the twentieth century, three couples bought it – and subsequently divorced. We were the third. Was the grey lady in any way responsible?

  I will always wonder.

  TWO MINUTES

  When he was a small boy, Rod Wexler loved to hang out on Brighton’s Palace Pier – long since renamed Brighton Pier. He liked looking down, through the holes in the metal gridding of the walkway, at the sinister, shadowy dark green water fifty feet below. And he was fascinated by the escapologist, the Great Omani, whose act (which the strange man repeated hourly, on the hour) was to tip a gallon of petrol into the sea below, drop a lighted taper to create a flaming circle, then tie himself up in a straitjacket, jump off the side of the pier into the flames, disappear below the surface, then emerge a minute or so later, triumphantly holding the straitjacket above his head, to a small ripple of applause.

  From an early age Rod had always been obsessed with trying to work things out; there were so many mysteries in the world, and the Great Omani’s es
cape act was one of the first to consume him. What, he wondered, was so clever about escaping, when you had tied yourself up in the first place? Now, if someone else had tied him up, that would be very different!

  But he never got a chance to study the act for long. When the Great Omani spotted him, he would shout at him angrily that his act wasn’t free, and people had to pay to watch him by putting money in his hat. ‘I don’t take pennies, son. Minimum a shilling on this bit of the pier – so pay up or clear off!’

  Rod did not think the act was worth a penny, let alone a shilling, which was an entire week’s pocket money. For him, there was much better value inside the amusement arcade. One row of wooden slot machines there, in particular, fascinated him.

  They had their names displayed on the outside, such as Haunted House!, Guillotine!, Gulliver’s Lilliput World! You pushed a penny coin into the slot and things would start to happen. The interior would light up behind the glass viewing window. He liked the haunted house. A coffin lid would rise up to reveal a glowing skeleton. A spider would drop down and rise up. Doors would open and apparitions would appear and disappear. The lights would flicker. It was like a cross between a very spooky doll’s house and a miniature ghost train.

  Rod had never been on the real ghost train, further down towards the end of the pier, because he’d seen people coming off it looking terrified; it scared him too much. Also, it was too expensive for his tiny budget. He could have six goes on these slot machines for the price of one sixpenny ghost train ride.

  But the machine he liked the most, on which he spent most of his shilling each week, was the Guillotine!

  He would push his penny coin into the slot, and then watch as a blindfolded Marie Antoinette was dragged to the guillotine, placed face down, and then after some moments a character would pull a lever, the blade would slide down, slice clean through her neck, and her head would drop into a basket. Then the lights would go out again.

  Every time he watched, he wondered, was she still conscious after her neck had been severed and, if so, for how long? And what, if anything, did she think about while her head was lying in that basket, in those final moments of her existence?

  Years later, as a forty-year-old adult, the attractions on the pier, like its name, had changed. The wooden penny-in-the-slot machines had been moved to a museum underneath the Arches, close to the pier, where they were maintained in working order. You could buy a bag of old penny coins and still activate the machines. He took his own kids to see them, but they weren’t impressed; they were more interested in computer games.

  But his own fascination never went away. He was enjoying a successful career as an actuary for a reinsurance group, in which his natural curiosity was able to flourish. His job was to calculate the odds, much like a bookmaker might, of accidents and disasters happening. One role, for instance, was to calculate the odds against rainfall happening in particular regions. In some parts of the south of England, much though the country had a reputation for being wet, he was able to demonstrate that, in fact, there were only ninety-four days a year when it actually rained – he defined it as there being precipitation at some point during the twenty-four hours of the day.

  Some of his friends called him a dullard, obsessed with facts and statistics. But he really, genuinely, loved his work. He liked to refute the saying that ‘No man on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.”’

  ‘I would say that,’ he would announce proudly in the pub and at parties. And it was true. Rod loved his work, he really did. Facts and statistics were his life; these were the things that gave him his bang. He loved to analyse everything, and break it all down to its component elements. He loved to be able to tell people stuff they didn’t know – such as what was the most dangerous form of travel, what your percentage chances were of dying of a particular ailment, or how long you were likely to live if you reached fifty.

  It used to infuriate his wife, Angie. ‘God, don’t you ever feel anything?’ she would ask him.

  ‘Feelings are dangerous,’ he would retort, which angered her further. But he wasn’t being frivolous, he genuinely believed that. ‘Life is dangerous, darling,’ he would say, trying to placate her. ‘No one gets out of here alive.’

  Once at a dinner party, he had raised the subject of his childhood fascination with the slot machine with the guillotine. A neurosurgeon friend, Paddy Mahony, sitting opposite him had said that he reckoned after being guillotined, people could remain conscious for up to two minutes. Or was it ninety seconds? Rod could not quite remember, although it was pretty relevant now, since one moment he had been texting his mistress, Romy, and the next he had looked up to see all the traffic ahead of him on the fast lane of the M4 had stopped dead.

  He was surprised at just how calm he felt as the bonnet of his Audi, bought for its safety points after analysis of crash statistics, slid under the tailgate of the truck. He frowned, thinking that there had been a law passed, surely, that they needed a bar to stop his car doing just what it was now doing – sliding under the tailgate while the occupants are decapitated. Like the guillotine.

  Funny, he thought, to be lying on a wet road, looking up at exhaust pipes and bumpers and number plates and brake lights. Not the way he would have chosen to exit this world, but it certainly was interesting to see if Paddy was right. Although, of course, he could not see his wristwatch. That was still in the car attached to the rest of him.

  ‘Hello,’ he said to a woman who climbed out of one of those little Nissan Micras, a bilious purple colour. ‘Could you tell me the time?’ He mouthed. But no sound came out.

  She screamed.

  This was not going well. Then she vomited. Fortunately she did not splash him. His sense of smell was acute at that moment. He felt no pain, but smelled diesel and puke. It was normally a smell that instantly made him puke too. But not today. He heard a siren.

  Suddenly, he remembered that old nuclear bomb thing of his youth. The four-minute warning. The warning you might get in the event of a pending nuclear attack. People being asked what they would do if they had only four minutes left to live.

  That threat had sort of faded away and been forgotten.

  He remembered another dinner party he’d been at a while ago. Everyone was asked what they would do in their last four minutes. Then someone, he could not remember who, had suggested just one minute. ‘That would really concentrate your mind!’ he had said.

  Now, by Rod’s calculation, he would be lucky to have another minute. Strange, he thought, our obsession with the time. Here I am, able to count my future in seconds, and I’m not worrying how my wife and kids are going to cope. All I want to know is the bloody—

  GIFTS IN THE NIGHT

  During my research for the spooky novels I wrote in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, I interviewed a large number of people, from all walks of life, who believed they’d had a paranormal experience of some kind. Some years back, seated next to HRH Princess Anne at a charity dinner – she’s a sparky lady and great fun to talk to – she told me a very convincing story about a friend of hers who had a poltergeist in her home. And the late great comedian, Michael Bentine, made my hairs stand on end with stories about his father who carried out exorcisms.

  I talked to mediums, clairvoyants, scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and became good friends with a truly extraordinary character, the late Professor Bob Morris, who had been appointed as the first Chair of Parapsychology in the UK, heading up the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University. What made Bob Morris a fascinating man, to me, was that he was a scientist – a physicist – who had had a paranormal experience early in his life, which had opened his mind to the existence of the paranormal.

  I learned from him an astounding statistic: that a survey was taken, in 1922, of scientists in Britain who believed in God. The results came out at 43 per cent. The same survey was repeated in 1988 and, very surprisingly, the results showed exactly the same percentage. But there
had been a significant shift: fewer biologists now believed in God, but more mathematicians and physicists proclaimed themselves believers.

  I listened to a large number of views and stories of strange experiences, and I talked to leading sceptics as well. For eighteen months, in 1990 and 1991, I hosted a regular Friday night radio phone-in show, taking calls from members of the public who had experienced something uncanny, or inexplicable, ranging from sightings of apparitions or bizarre coincidences to past-life memories or a sense of déjà-vu. In 1993 I was commissioned by the BBC to present a show in Scotland, in which I was given carte blanche to travel around interviewing people who claimed to have had paranormal encounters.

  Many of the stories I was told were chilling, some were distressing, but the majority, when I examined them further, turned out to have credible rational explanations. I learned that both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church employ diocesan exorcists – although they are given the less dramatic titles of Ministers of Deliverance.

  The role of a Minister of Deliverance is to investigate any apparent paranormal occurrence brought to the attention of the local vicar or priest, and for which they had no explanation. But of major importance in this role is to rule out the paranormal wherever possible and produce rational explanations. As an example, there was a papal edict in the Catholic Church, issued over two centuries ago, warning priests not to confuse demonic possession with the tricks played on people’s minds as a result of grief, and stating that no exorcisms should be carried out on anyone within two years of them suffering a bereavement.

  I became good friends with one Minister, a senior clergyman with considerable experience of people who claimed to have had paranormal encounters, and who is himself an extremely caring and rational man. I will call him Francis Wells. He is a modern-thinking clergyman, with a distinguished university background in psychology, who has deep faith but once confided in me that he had problems with the conventional biblical image of God. His primary objective in all cases brought to him was to try to find a rational explanation. For instance, he was regularly called in to investigate people deeply disturbed by occurrences following Ouija board sessions. His view of such sessions, after over thirty years of investigations, is that the Ouija does not open up channels to the spirit world, but rather opens up the Pandora’s box of demons that each and every one of us carries in our psyche.