The Secret of Crickley Hall

And then, when she wouldn't move, wouldn't acknowledge him, a coldness flushed through Maurice. He was completely alone again. The alliance between himself, Augustus and Magda was over. Augustus would be sent to jail for what he'd done—even hanged—and Magda would lose her job. No, worse than that. For murdering the teacher, Nancy Linnet, she would be put in prison for the rest of her life. Unless she told the police and the judge that he, Maurice, had struck the fatal blow that killed Miss Linnet, and she had only helped him get rid of the body. She wouldn't tell them it was she who had pushed the teacher down the stairs, she would blame it all on him!

He slid a few inches away from Magda on the bench and searched her profile. Would she tell on him? She didn't seem right in the head, it was as if something had closed down inside her. Why wouldn't she speak to him, why did she just sit there?

The slamming of the doors had finished now and he peeked past his silent companion to see the station man looking in the opposite direction, checking all the carriage doors were shut and there were no more passengers trying to board at that end.

Maurice knew he had to make a decision right then. If the police caught him they'd send him to Borstal, where all the bad boys went; or maybe, even worse, they'd put him in a grown-up prison because that's what they did with anyone who had murdered another person. Perhaps they'd even hang him, like Augustus. How old did you have to be before you got the rope?

Maurice ran for the carriage as a whistle blew and, once aboard and the train was slowly moving out of the station, he looked through a window at the solitary figure sitting there on the platform bench. Magda did not seem to see him as he passed.

•

Maurice Stafford—the older Maurice Stafford, no longer a boy but a man of seventy-five years who now lived under a different name—tried to flex his left knee in the limited space beneath the Mondeo's steering wheel. His leg always felt worse when the weather was cold or wet, a flaw in his otherwise healthy body, and he thought back to when the injury had occurred.

•

The accident had happened when he was still a boy scavenging in the ruins of the bomb-blasted city, stealing from grocery shops whose owners displayed their wares—fruit (limited) and vegetables (basic)—outside in boxes on the pavement, or from barrows in the markets. At night he slept in partially demolished houses, and on particularly cold nights he went to the underground shelters that some families still used even though the bombing appeared to have stopped (this was before the flying bombs, the V-1s and V-2s, Hitler's newest weapons, began their reign of terror). Most of the families shared their rations with him after he had explained that his father had died overseas and that his mother was an ambulance driver on call that night—he would tell anxious women that his mother always dropped him at a shelter before she went on to do her duty. It was never difficult to attach himself to families or women.

In fact, he had used a large family group—three boys, one about his own age, two girls and their mother—to get past the ticket collector on the day he'd arrived in the heart of the capital on the West Country train, the day he had left Magda Cribben sitting alone on the distant platform. From their chatter, he had gleaned that the boys and girls were evacuees like himself and that their mother had decided to bring them home to London now that the bombings had stopped; it was simple to merge with them among all the other arrivals, then pass unnoticed through the barrier, the collector having no time to count the tickets.

The hauntings had begun just before he broke his leg—indeed the first one was the prime cause of the injury. It had been a chilly April night and he was in a house whose upper floors had been gutted. Maurice snuck into a corner over creaky floorboards, pulling the collar of the over-sized overcoat that a kindly market porter had given him tight around his neck and jaw. Moonlight shone through two glassless windows, spreading across the floor of what once must have been a front parlour. All furniture and ornaments had been salvaged (or looted), for the room was quite empty save for rubble and shattered glass. Weary from a morning's work and roaming the bustling streets—war or no war, the city carried on as normal, the difference being that most of the women wore cheap, dull or homemade clothes, while the majority of men were middle-aged or elderly, those that were younger usually wearing military uniforms, and there were walls of sandbags protecting doorways and tape criss-crossing windows—Maurice soon drifted off to a fractured sleep, too uncomfortable and cold to lie peacefully.

He wasn't sure what woke him—a policeman outside on his rounds, an ARP warden on his way somewhere—something had interrupted his uneasy slumber anyway. He peeked out from his corner, the lapel tips of his coat touching over his chin. If there had been a noise—maybe a rat scuttling through the debris—it was gone now. Maurice snuggled down again, a shoulder fitting into the corner, but no sooner had he closed his eyes than he opened them again. Squinting, he peered into the shadowy corners opposite. There was someone standing in one of them, he was sure. Someone moving in the blackness. Moving out as if to cross the room in his direction.

He gave a little whimper and drew his knees up to his chest, trying to make himself smaller, less easily seen. The shape stopped in the clearly defined light from one of the windows and he saw that it was a man. And there was something familiar about him, the skinny body, the white hair lit by the moon, the rigid stance. Maurice recognized who it was from that alone.

How had Augustus Cribben found him here in London? How could he know where Maurice sheltered? Why was he naked? How could he walk through the rubble without disturbing it or making a noise? Then the boy realized the moonlight was shining through the figure! Maurice caught his breath.

At the orphanage before Crickley Hall, one of the female carers, a hefty woman with a ruddy face and wiry hair, had delighted in telling the children bedtime stories about hauntings, and she had claimed that all ghosts were transparent, you could see right through them. And now Maurice could see the shape of the smashed windows through Augustus Cribben.

The boy's eyes bulged as if ready to pop from their sockets, and the hairs at the back of his neck seemed to divide and stand straight. Was Cribben dead? Was this his ghost?

Maurice screeched, a high-pitched terrified sound that shot through the murky London air. He scrambled to his feet, his shoulder brushing against the wall, wiping off dirt and dust, while the ghost, now unmoving, looked on. The boy screeched again, pushing his back into the corner as if to sink through it. The room had become bitterly cold and Maurice saw his own breath materialize in front of him. The limpid image of Augustus Cribben remained still, but Maurice could feel the eyes, even though they were hidden in shadows, boring into his.

Never before had Maurice been so frightened, not even when he and Magda had ran out of Crickley Hall all those months ago. It was as if something bad, something frigid had seized his mind, his body. What did the ghost want from him?

With a panicky wail, he made a dash for the doorless opening on the other side of the room, skirting round the flimsy vision that merely turned to follow his progress. He was halfway there when the bomb-weakened floorboards collapsed inwards, sending Maurice plummeting down into the basement below.

Timber and bricks fell with him, three bricks joined together glancing off his head, debris of cracked floorboards landing on his left leg, pinning it to the stone floor. The blow to the head, although stunning him and causing blood to pour, failed to distract him from the pain of his broken leg.

Maurice screamed and screamed before passing out and the last thing he saw as he slipped into unconsciousness was a face looking down at him from the opening above. It wasn't Cribben's face.

•

An indistinct bulk sitting in the darkness of the car, he bit into his lip. The rain, the wind, was unremitting and Maurice flinched at the bitter torment of memories.

His mood had changed. The calmness had left him for the moment.

It had been the first of the hauntings that were eventually to undermine his sanity. Followed by the dreams that had lost him his freedom for a while when he was young.

•

The man who had rescued him from the cellar (and perhaps who had chased away the ghost) was an ARP warden called Henry Pyke, and he and his wife, Dorothy, would play an important part in the boy's life from then on.

The national dailies carried the story of the 'mystery boy' found in the ruins of a building and who had lost his memory due to a blow to his head (it was thought). It made the front pages for more than a week, his photograph, which had been taken while he was in hospital recovering from his injuries, printed large for the first three days, the caption beneath appealing for anyone who knew the boy's identity to come forward. No one ever did. The picture released to the press was too bleached out, worse when it was reproduced, and a bandage covered his forehead, so that even the market traders for whom he had done odd jobs failed to recognize him.

The boy had been unable to tell the authorities anything about himself—what his name was, who his parents were, how he came to be in the bomb-gutted house where he was found. His photograph was even circulated among the troops in England and abroad, but still no one claimed him for their own. Eventually it was suggested that perhaps both his parents had perished in the earlier Blitz, and the boy, lost and confused, had roamed the streets ever since. There appeared to be no other explanation.

Public interest waned and the story was relegated to a couple of column inches on the inside pages, while the frontpage headlines returned to more urgent world events.

The anonymous boy spent the next six months in hospital recovering from his injuries—his left leg had been badly broken—and the doctors hoped his memory would return of its own accord. But it never did.

Because of his size and his evident maturity, the patient's age was approximated at fourteen years, and Maurice, whose memory was fine, did not disagree with them (he was by now thirteen years of age anyway). Henry Pyke, the Air Raid Precautions warden who had discovered Maurice and carried him up from the cellar, had taken a special interest in the boy and had visited him several times a week at the hospital. As time went by and the 'lost' boy remained unclaimed, the warden began to bring his wife to see him. Theirs was a childless marriage and for years they had longed for a son or daughter. They grew so fond of Maurice, who was shy and well-mannered and had a wonderful shine to his eyes, that they decided that if the boy's parents or relatives were not found soon, then they themselves would apply to adopt him for their own. And that was precisely what happened. The authorities had not known quite what to do with the amnesic boy, and the Pykes had provided the ideal solution. They would allow the couple, who were in their early forties and now unlikely to have a child themselves, to foster the boy for a year or so with a view to full adoption.

Maurice Stafford, who had not forgotten his name or how he had returned to London, nor the horror he had left behind in Crickley Hall, was renamed Gordon Pyke.

The Pykes were gloriously happy with their new-found son, who hobbled around on crutches while his injured leg strengthened, and the boy did his best to conceal the unpleasant side of his nature, a task that was not difficult for him over the first few months. But then the nightmares had begun, prompted, he had always felt, by the fresh attacks on the city, this time pilotless rockets sent over from the coasts of Europe by the desperate Germans. The doodlebugs, as the first V-1 rockets were nicknamed, brought hell back to the capital. The drone of their engines was feared, but the silence when the engines cut out and the flying bombs dropped through the sky were feared even more.

Henry Pyke was killed while on duty in a school hall acquisitioned by the ARP when a doodlebug fell on it and completely destroyed the building. Seven other people lost their lives with him.

The nightmares that came to plague young Gordon Pyke were intense and damaging. They made his nerves bad; they made him neurotic and paranoid.

These terrible dreams varied in content but were constant over the years. In one (the first one he had), he is on a train and he can see Magda Cribben's white face outside the window. Her mouth is open but he can't hear her shouts. Her pale fingers claw at the glass as the train begins to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed, leaving Magda behind, her face ugly in its contortions. He is always struck by an acute loneliness as the train leaves the woman far behind. In another, he is standing at the foot of the stairs in Crickley Hall and all the other orphans who had been evacuated with him are higher up, each to a step, and he feels deep shame as they stare down at him, for he knows they are all dead. When they beckon him, silently inviting him to join them on the stairs, he doesn't move. He can't, he's paralysed. So the dead start to come down to him and he can see the emptiness in their eyes, the lifelessness of their corpses; he can smell their decay. In yet another, he is flagellating Augustus Cribben's nude body with a bamboo cane, and as he does so, the skin parts, wounds open, Cribben's abused body becomes raw red meat and no longer recognizable as human. But he can't stop the flogging, he wields the cane until the meat begins to pulp, then disintegrate, and the gore puddles at the feet of the thing that is no longer a man but now a mashed carcass that starts to corrupt and rot and fall away until finally it is nothing more than boneless lumps of flesh in the spreading pool of blood. Even then he cannot stop; he continues to thrash the bloody mounds, and the cane itself becomes red and slippery until it slides from his hand and he falls to his knees in the muck he has created. He always woke up at that point, shivering yet sweaty, clammy, peering round frantically, searching for anything lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. The final nightmare in the cycle of four has him up to his neck in cold water that is as black as the space around him. A circle of dull grey light comes from high above, and when he feels the slimy walls they are circular. Naturally he is frightened in this predicament, but the real fear comes when he realizes there is something in the inky water with him. He can't see it, but he can sense it. As something brittle, like the decayed fingers of a claw, wraps itself round his wrist he starts to scream and it becomes a real, waking scream that seems to rebound off the walls of his room.

Yes, the dreams were bad, for their consistency as much as their nature, but it was the second appearance of the ghost that had him gibbering on the floor of his bedroom, his curled body pushed tightly into a corner, his hand scratching frantically at the wallpaper and his teeth chattering, his eyes bulging.

It was late at night and he was lying in bed, just beginning to doze, hoping that his sleep would be dreamless, when he heard the familiar sound.

Swish-thwack.

He was afraid to open his eyes, but also afraid not to. He could feel the room had become icy and the air was foul, as if a large rat lay dead and mouldering beneath the floorboards.

Swish-thwack.

He forced his eyes open.

Because of his nightmares, he always slept with the ceiling light on, so anything in the room was plainly visible. Only too visible. The figure of Augustus Cribben was coming slowly towards the bed, and this time it was not transparent, it was as firm and solid as when Cribben was alive. Only twin gleams of light could be seen of the shadowed eyes, but the lips plainly moved as if the vision was speaking.

It had to be a ghost, but it looked so real!

The cane came down hard on the bedspread and, impossibly, he saw dust rise from the material. The cane came down again and this time it hit his leg, the one that had been broken by his fall into the cellar, and although the pain was mostly absorbed by the cover, it was still strong enough to release the scream that had struggled to escape him the moment he saw the ghost.

He leapt out of bed and cowered in the corner of the room where he stayed, blubbering, until his adoptive mother burst through the door and ran to kneel beside him. It took Dorothy more than an hour to convince her adoptive son there was nobody else in the room.

His behaviour from then on was alarming. He twitched every time she touched him and shrank away when she tried to take him in her arms and comfort him (now widowed, Dorothy needed comforting herself, especially from the son she had always longed for). Gordon wouldn't speak to her either and he refused to meet her gaze: he hunched his shoulders, leaning over the walking stick he now used (the break in his leg had never healed properly), and his eyes darted craftily as if he had some secret to keep. He became agitated whenever it was time for bed and for three nights running she had to rush into his room, brought there by his dreadful screams. On each occasion she found him huddled in the corner of the well-lit room, his body shaking, his eyes wide.

Only then did Dorothy seek medical help for him and her GP immediately sent the boy for psychiatric treatment.

'They'll soon sort him out,' was the doctor's opinion.

But once in the mental home, Gordon, like Magda Cribben before him, withdrew into himself even more, blocking out the world so that nothing could reach him, especially the lunatics he was forced to share the ward with. He could not escape the ghost, though, nor the nightmare dreams of Crickley Hall, but in time he learnt to control his reaction to them.

When Cribben's ghost now appeared, Gordon would stifle his own screams with a fist to his mouth and a hand over his eyes. The horror was still there, but self-preservation had always been his strength. He wanted to leave this place of mad people and to do so he knew he had to appear inwardly and outwardly normal. He did not care for their drugs and physical restraints.

When the nightmares came, he learned to be still when he awoke from them, not to cry out or complain, to weep silently beneath the bedclothes until repetition hardened him even against tears.

He could not tell his personal psychiatrist of what he had done and what he had witnessed at Crickley Hall—if he did he probably would not have been released for years, if ever. So when he came out of what had become his own self-imposed shell, he made up stories of explosions and houses toppling down onto him and big holes opening up to swallow him and the sound of sirens, air-raid warnings constantly ringing in his head.

The medical profession had become used to dealing with shell-shocked victims during and after the war, and the psychiatrist easily recognized the condition in Gordon Pyke. He also knew of the boy's history, how he had suffered from amnesia, forgetting how he had become parentless and alone: who knew what trauma he had endured before? Gordon had finally started to talk freely and seemed to be making a sudden, rapid recovery. After five months of confinement, Gordon was released.

However, the relationship with his adoptive mother was never the same again: after all, it was she who had agreed to his internment in a mental hospital. He rarely spoke to her now and, as he grew older and taller, his attitude towards her became menacing. She started to be afraid of him.

Although the war was long over, conscription was still mandatory for eighteen-year-old males and when he reached that age, he received his call-up papers for National Service. Fortunately, as he saw it, he was rejected by the military because of his invalid status—he still used a walking stick. His psychiatric history would probably have excluded him anyway. So now, Gordon Pyke, who had decent school reports (ironically, he was placed in a lower year—which was more suited to his real age—because of his absence from school due to injury and time in the psychiatric hospital), found a job as a junior librarian in a library not far from where he lived.

The hauntings and nightmares continued through the years and they were always terrifying, even though he had become used to them. Perhaps inevitably, the hauntings aroused in him an interest in the supernatural. Were ghosts possible, did he really see the ghost of Cribben, or did he imagine it? He read the books on the subject stocked in his own library and they gave him an appetite for more. He visited bookshops that specialized in the supernatural and paranormal. If others had witnessed such apparitions, the phenomenon not just in his own mind, then maybe the haunting was genuine. In several books he discovered that ethereal bodies were created when the consciousness of a dying person leaves the body and exists somewhere between the spiritual and the physical, often because of the trauma of death itself, or because there is something left unfinished for them in the real world.

It caused him to wonder if that was why Augustus Cribben was plaguing him now. If that were the case, then why did the ghost appear to him? How could he help Cribben resolve something left unfinished? It was a question to which Pyke had no answer.

•

Gordon Pyke, once known as Maurice Stafford, shifted restlessly in the driver's seat of the Mondeo. His leg was giving him particular gyp tonight. Always did in cold or wet weather, but this was worse than ever. He rubbed his knee with his big hand. He had to curb his impatience. Let the family settle in for the night.

He wiped mist from the side window with the sleeve of his coat and peered through. Rainwater was running fast down the lane, creating its own shallow river. Lightning flared and the crack of thunder soon followed, so loud it made him want to duck his head.

This is so right, he thought, so much like the night he and Magda had fled Crickley Hall. Would there be another flood? he wondered. Well, that would make things perfect.

To restrain his agitation, he went back to his memories.

•

His adoptive mother, Dorothy Pyke, with whom he still shared a house, had passed away from a fatal dose of flu that led to pneumonia when Gordon was twenty-eight. It was a relief to him—they had despised each other for years. Surprisingly, in view of their strained relationship, she left the house and the small amount of money she had managed to save from her widow's pension to him. But then, who else did she have to leave anything to? He soon sold the house and moved into a small rented flat, placing the modest amount that came from the sale and the money he had inherited into a deposit account in a bank.

Now that he could afford it—his salary as a librarian was pitifully low—Pyke took to visiting prostitutes, particularly searching out the older variety who were more than happy to provide the kind of service he required. In fact, it made the job easier for them because they did not have to pretend enjoyment. The deal was that they had to keep perfectly still and exhibit no passion whatsoever while he used their bodies. (Initially, he had tried the younger whores but was always disgusted by their squirming and sighing, feigned or otherwise.)

For a while—less than a year—he was married. Pyke, with his apparent courtly manners and his gentle eyes, was attractive to certain women. He was tall, and well built too, which added to the attraction. His new wife, Madeleine, was almost pretty despite the thick horn-rimmed glasses she wore and the size of her teeth that kept her lips permanently parted. An avid reader, she was a member of his library and her borrowing of books increased after he had mildly flirted with her one day as he stamped her choices for that week. At first enthralled with her husband, she did her best to please him, but as the weeks went by she began to resent his lengthy silences and his constant brooding. In sleep he was often unsettled, sometimes waking up with a start, his pyjamas damp with perspiration. But never did he explain his dreams to her.

His method of making love was decidedly odd and a great disappointment to her. He demanded that she remain passive when they had sex (Madeleine was a virgin and hadn't known quite what to expect, though she was sure it wasn't this), that she should not respond in any way to his attentions. If she expressed the slightest passion, if she breathed too sharply or too deeply, he would abruptly bring the engagement to an end. Although he did not rage at her, he would become even more distant.

It did not take long for her to realize that all his good manners and apparent kindliness were a sham, meant for others to think well of him, whereas in reality he was a cold, remote man who was indifferent to everybody else. But what finally repelled her was when he told her she was to submit to beatings. With a stick. A stick that had lain hidden on top of the bedroom wardrobe, a thin yellowish stick that must have been purchased from a school supplies outlet, for one end was crooked so it looked like a headmaster's cane.

She refused. He beat her anyway.

Madeleine, her back, arms and legs stiff with throbbing red stripes beneath her blouse and skirt, packed her bags and left him the following day. Pyke didn't care much: he had expected this plain and timid little thing to be pliant to his will. Because of her dowdiness, her lack of glamour, she would be grateful to be moulded to his liking. Her wails of protest and her pitiful tears when he flogged her that night had spoilt his pleasure, for he had begun to crave the stimulation of inflicting longed-for pain again. Madeleine was a grave disappointment to him.

The divorce took ages to go through (as it did in those days) but by then Pyke had found someone else to help satisfy his needs, an ageing homosexual he had met in a Soho dive. It was almost perfect, because the man was only a little older than Augustus Cribben had been, and he gloried in pain, begged for chastisement. Although Pyke was always aroused, there was never any sex between the two men: Pyke didn't consider himself 'queer'.

It was only when he went too far in one of their sessions, beating his partner in sado-masochism so brutally that he turned the man into a bloodied, howling mess, that the arrangement was swiftly brought to an end. The unfortunate victim, who had suffered far greater pain than he had ever imagined or desired, threatened to go to the police and have Pyke arrested for attempted murder. Pyke ran and never went back to the seedy drinking club where they had met. Fortunately, he had used an alias (ironically, the name Maurice Stafford) during their association and the beatings had only ever taken place in the other man's humble little flat above Berwick Street market.

The hauntings and the nightmares persisted, although the ghost gradually became less dense, as if it were losing power, and the dreams became less vivid, but nevertheless still harrowing. Over time he learned to accommodate both. But eventually a strange compulsion to see Crickley Hall once again nagged at him and he could not understand why. It wasn't sentimentality: he still feared the place and was unable to erase the memory of that last terrible night from his mind. He felt that his own guilt lay there, waiting for him to return and acknowledge it.

One year, when he was in his mid-thirties and on a summer break from the library, he took the early-morning train and went back to Hollow Bay. He caught the bus from the station to the harbour village and stared hard at Crickley Hall when he went past. It was as grey and grim as ever, but he felt no sensation whatsoever: good or bad, it was just a sombre unprepossessing pile standing on the other side of the river with the gorge rising sheer behind it. He alighted from the bus at the bottom of the hill, then walked back up. Crossing the short wooden bridge, he took the path to Crickley Hall's front door and, without hesitation, knocked the gothic door knocker loudly.

There was no answer, nobody came. When he knocked once more and still no one came to the door, he looked through all the ground-floor windows, even those at the back of the house where the gorge wall, with its thick vegetation, rose dramatically just feet away from the building itself. The house appeared unoccupied, for dustsheets covered the furniture and the kitchen's counters and tabletop were bare. Pyke was disappointed that no emotion was aroused in him; yet somehow he felt drawn to the place, even though there seemed to be no answer for him there. The hauntings remained a mystery.

Back at the village, he visited its only public house, the Barnaby Inn, and ordered himself some sandwiches and a gin and tonic. While there, and on his second drink, he got chatting to an elderly, roughly dressed man who looked like a local, the kind of regular customer who had nothing better to do than spend his lunchtime and evenings in a pub, a solitary drinker who welcomed conversation with anyone who would give him the time. When Pyke enquired about the village, the old boy inevitably mentioned the great flood that had engulfed it during the war, the biggest and most awful event in Hollow Bay's history. Sixty-eight folk were killed that night, eleven of 'em orphans, who'd been evacuated from London to Crickley Hall, the big house up the hill. Their guardian drowned with 'em as well. Only person to survive were a teacher, guardian's sister apparently, an' she must've got away before the floodwaters came down the gorge. They say she's never spoke a word since the day she were found. Shock, they reckoned. Shock, because all them kiddies in her charge was dead, as well as her own brother. Couldn't remember her and her brother's name after all this time though.

Keenly interested, Pyke had asked what had become of the woman. Although he hadn't known Magda's true age at Crickley Hall, Pyke guessed she was probably into her sixties by now. That is, if she were still alive.

Last I were told, came the reply, she were put away in the loony bin. Ilfracombe had the only one in them days. Can't say what become of her after that.

Pyke found Collingwood House by journeying to Ilfracombe and making enquiries at the seaside town's main library. He was given directions to the mental home and he walked nearly two miles to get there, his bad leg protesting most of the way. It was an old redbrick building sparse in embellishment and quite unlike the psychiatric hospital he had been confined to as a youth. This was a mental home, a place for lost causes. In the olden days it would have been called a lunatic asylum.

Inside, he could have sworn there was the tragic smell of mental decay, although it was surely a combination of boiled cabbage, detergent and piss. Again he was reminded of his own incarceration all those years ago and he had an urge to flee the building; but he was too curious to leave.

At the reception desk, he enquired if a Magda Cribben was still a patient, and the receptionist checked a list and informed him that yes, Cribben—only surnames in those days—was a long-term resident (she emphasized resident as though patient was an ugly word). He used to be one of her pupils, Pyke told the uninterested girl, and he had only recently learned of the ex-teacher's circumstances. He had been very fond of Miss Cribben, so would it be possible for him to visit her?

He waited while the receptionist conferred on the internal tine with someone of authority and when she finished her conversation she said yes, although it was not strictly visiting hours, he would be allowed to see Cribben, and that was only because Cribben rarely received visitors—in fact never, as far as the receptionist knew, and she had been employed at Collingwood House for the past five years. A male nurse dressed in white jacket and trousers duly arrived and led Pyke down a long corridor on the ground floor. The walls were painted a lifeless grey and there were scuff marks and scratches along its length as if the inmates had struggled all the way when being taken to their rooms or padded cells. As he followed the nurse, whose thick biceps were evident beneath his tight, starched sleeves, Pyke was warned that, frankly, it was pointless to visit Cribben because she was a zombie—the nurse's own appraisal of his patient's condition—and hadn't said a word to anybody since she'd arrived at Collingwood House back in 1943. He knew this because colleagues had passed it on when he himself joined the staff. Pyke wondered if she would recognize him after all this time.

He was startled by her gaunt figure and her ashen face and hands. Magda never had much weight, but now she was skeletal, and although her complexion had been pallid before, now it was almost bloodless. She seemed to have shrunk—but then he had grown taller. The hardness had not retreated from her features with age and the lines on her tight skin were many and deeply etched. Her cheeks were sunken, but her jaw was still strong. She was dressed in black, which was no different from before, and the hem of her skirt ended just above her bony ankles. Her eyes, though, were as black and sharp as ever. Yet they showed no reaction when he entered the tiny cell.

Even when the nurse had left and they were alone there was no acknowledgement. She was sitting bolt-upright on a hard wooden chair beside her narrow bed and there was nowhere else for him to rest except the bed itself. He stood, putting all his weight on his good right leg.

Pyke started by reminding her of Crickley Hall and all the things they had done together, a sly conspiratorial smile on his face, nothing on hers. He talked of her brother and the harsh regime that had governed the orphans' home that was also a school and there was no recognition. But he was glad at last to speak to someone about his hidden past, even though he might just as well have been yakking to himself for all the response he got. Her eyelids did not flicker when he mentioned the murder of the young teacher and how, together, they had disposed of the body. He felt satisfied when there was no response, for this was good, their secret was safe. He had always worried about someone else knowing of his crime, but Magda was not only mute, she seemed to have forgotten the deed. Her mind was blank, she had lost all memory of it. She had even forgotten that last horrendous night that haunted him still because of his own guilt. After all, it was he who had informed on the other children. It was he who had betrayed them.

He left Magda Críbben with mixed feelings: disappointed that he had no one with whom to share the past—and they were exciting times for him—but also relieved that there was no one left to expose his former life as Maurice Stafford.

Although his exterior inspection of Crickley Hall had been fruitless, he remained drawn to it, for his few months there as a boy had marked him for life, an experience that had shaped his nature—and, though he could not know it, his destiny.

When Pyke returned to London and his job as librarian, he asked for a transfer. Somewhere in North Devon, he indicated. Meanwhile his interest in things otherworldly continued and he soon found himself fascinated by all aspects of the occult. But the dreams came back with full force and Cribben's ghost had regathered its strength, although now it appeared as a murky blackness, barely resembling the figure of a man, more of a noxious ragged mist, a strong unpleasant odour always preceding the manifestation. Despite its lack of clear definition, Pyke always knew it was Cribben's shade, for its overwhelming malevolence was the same and with it there always came the familiar swish-thwack sound, only as a kind of distant echo it was true, but nevertheless there to remind him of the punishment cane, the harbinger of pain that had terrified the orphans of Crickley Hall so. The dreams also revived their intensity—and their clarity—so that sleep became an ordeal once more. Pyke suffered his second psychological breakdown.

Considered to be a danger to himself as well as others when his rages got out of control, he was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward of a large London hospital. Fortunately for Pyke, treatment for mental illness had improved significantly since he was a boy and within three months his condition had improved enough for him to be discharged (the doctors weren't to know that his apparent return to normality was because the hauntings and the power of the nightmares had waned again, making it easier for him to cope).

His position at the library had been generously held open for him, although the chief librarian regarded Gordon Pyke's request for a transfer to the West Country a priority: the slower pace of life would be of benefit to his neurotic employee. As luck would have it, a vacancy for an assistant librarian shortly came up in the large Devon town of Barnstaple and Pyke duly went down to the beautiful county and took the job.

Growing older did not dim his interest in psychic phenomena and spontaneous psychic activity. If anything, his fascination with the subject increased as the years went by, for he longed to know what lay beyond death and he needed to be assured that Cribben's ghost was not hallucinatory, a figment of his own imagination (which would mean he truly was mad). He read the works of respected psychical researchers from which he learned that certain people could attract and concentrate psychic forces. He also learned that nobody yet knows the boundaries of what is considered normal, nor the extremities of that which is considered supernormal. He learned practical methods of detecting the possible presence of a ghost by the simple use of a thermometer or thermograph: when a ghost is present it seems to create a partial vacuum which results in a drop in pressure and temperature (the atmosphere certainly became cold whenever Cribben's spirit appeared to him). And it was also reaffirmed to him that a ghost is generally an earthbound spirit trapped in the physical world because of trauma at death or unfinished business (what could Augustus Cribben have left unfinished? he asked himself yet again). He also learned that a violent act can sometimes leave a psychic imprint on a place that later will attract supernatural activity (even he, so very much alive, was strangely drawn to Crickley Hall, so why not spirits too?).

Pyke was absorbed with the works of psychic investigators and began to wonder if he himself could become one. Divorced, a routine, undemanding career, plenty of spare evenings and weekends—why not become a part-time ghost-hunter? He certainly had good knowledge of what was involved by now. Over the following months he acquired some of the basic equipment recommended for such investigations, simple things like notebooks, thermometers (including the greenhouse type), coloured pencils and crayons, synthetic black thread as well as white cotton thread, tape measures (one of them an architect's thirty-three-foot leather-cased winding tape), talcum powder, drawing pins, graph paper, torches, and also more expensive items like cameras for colour, black-and-white, and infra-red film, a Polaroid camera, tripod, digital camcorder, spring balance (for weight of objects if moved), strain gauge (for measuring force to open or close doors), voltmeter, portable sound-recorder, frequency-change detector, instruments for measuring atmospheric pressure, vibration, wind force and humidity, and a magnetometer. There were other more expensive and sophisticated items that would be useful, such as closed-circuit television, a capacity-change recorder, or an Acorn computer that had the ability to monitor changes in temperature, light and vibration, and having sound-recording equipment attached, but Pyke decided he'd collected enough for his amateur status. The good thing was that no licence or degrees in psychic phenomena were required.

He joined various associations connected with parapsychological studies and psychic research and attended spiritual meetings (which he was surprised to discover thrived in both towns of Barnstaple and Ilfracombe) where he made useful contacts. Through these, and by placing small discreet ads in local newspapers and freesheets, he began to gain clients who wanted his 'expertise' in investigating hauntings in their homes, pubs and once even a theatre. His efforts generally met with success, often finding quite natural reasons for supposed supernatural or paranormal activity, while at other times confirming that yes, there was a ghost or ghosts on the premises.

When Pyke reached the age of sixty-five, he retired from the library and devoted more of his time to ghost-hunting. There were never very many cases to investigate or explore, but just enough to occupy him in his retirement. He had even written papers on some of his investigations and submitted them to the London Society for Psychical Research, which had never published any but had kept them on file, commending him for his work. In order to drum up more business, he made use of a cuttings agency which sent him any news items or features from the south-west journals concerning suspected or alleged hauntings. These he would follow up by getting in touch with the 'victims' involved (always quickly, to get in before any fellow investigators who used the same methods of finding cases) and offer his services. The fact that he was financially comfortable (he had never squandered his small inheritance and the money he received from the sale of his old London home, and there was still a reasonable residue left) meant he did not have to charge would-be clients—he only asked remuneration for his expenses—and this made him instantly attractive to them.

He invariably presented himself as a knowledgeable and sympathetic sceptic and his apparent normality, plus his engaging manner, swiftly won people over. Yet despite his usual successes and resolved cases, he had never discovered the cause of his own hauntings.

Over a period of time, he had approached four reputable mediums in the hope that they would come up with an answer to the mystery, but the first two had regarded him with something like fear in their expressions and had asked him to leave immediately, while the third had cried out, then collapsed in a heap on the floor only moments after going into a trance. Her husband, who had been present, demanded that Pyke leave the house and never come back. The fourth and last, without even going into a trance, had warned him that he would be tormented by hauntings until something was resolved and only he could know what it was. Bewildered, he had asked the medium how she knew this, but she had avoided looking at him directly in the eyes and refused to reply. But as he had reluctantly turned and was walking away, she called after him, her voice quiet yet her words distinct.

'It will only get worse for you,' she had told him. 'Unless you fulfil his wish—no, his command— if you don't, you'll never be free of him. It'll become unbearable, you'll suffer…'

But he refused to listen any more as he hobbled away, moving as fast as his bad leg would allow. The medium had not provided any answer, she had just given him a dire warning, filling him with fear for the future.

That was a year ago and the medium had been right: the hauntings had become worse, worse than when he had been a boy even. Pyke had begun to be afraid for his sanity again, for the ghost of Augustus Cribben now came so close to him that he could smell the putridity of its inner core over the noxious fumes that accompanied its presence. The atmosphere would become so cold that his body, which was in paralysis, felt like ice, a frozen vessel in which his mind was trapped. He was afraid to sleep, night or day, because the dreams had found fresh vigour and were as clear as reality, and they came to him at any time. He was exhausted and nervous, and he knew he could not go on like this, that the hauntings and nightmares would break him as they had before, only this time he would not recover, this time he would be broken for good.

Then, just five months ago, depleted and desperate, he did something he should have done long, long ago, for it gave him the answer for which he had been searching, the way of resolution.

He used the microfiche reader facility in the same library where he had once been employed and he sourced the front pages of national and local daily newspapers for October 1943.

With these he had travelled back to the past.