Cumbrian Ghost Stories

by Tony Walker

  “What do you mean?” Amy was puzzled.

  “Any impressions you get about me.”

  Amy sat back. She steepled her hands and rested her chin on them. “Well, you’re a very nice lady, I can tell that. You have a very warm energy.”

  “Thank you,” Joan said.

  “And...” Amy narrowed her eyes in concentration. “I think you’ve suffered some tragedies in your life. You’re from Brazil aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Amy smiled. This was going well. She said, “And I sense a darkness about you.”

  “Darkness?”

  Amy reached out and stroked Joan’s forearm to reassure her. “Not from you — about you — in the past, I mean.”

  “Ah.”

  “Maybe a sadness. I sense suffering. Can you take that?”

  Joan nodded and smiled sadly. “That makes sense.”

  Amy sucked her lip. “You’re a very mysterious lady. I get that.”

  Joan’s face was expressionless.

  Amy said, “But I think you are going to have a very pleasant surprise. No, not a surprise - a gift. Maybe even a reward. Does that make sense?”

  Joan smiled. “It would be nice to get a reward.”

  Amy grinned again. “Of course it would. Now have you finished your tea? I’ll take a look at those tea-leaves.”

  For the next half an hour, Amy told Joan things of little consequence that tripped off her tongue while her mind went round what she usually said to clients to make them feel good about themselves, and her, of course. Especially her. She wanted them to leave thinking that she was a lovely person who’d really helped them, and who deserved a little something by way of a thank you.

  Joan smiled and accepted everything she told her. Then Amy said, “Well, Joan. I have another client in ten minutes.”

  “So that’s it?”

  Amy patted Joan’s hand. “Sorry to disappoint - no lottery win! But we’ve had a good session, haven’t we?”

  “Oh, yes. Splendid.”

  Both women stood. Joan smoothed down her plain brown dress.

  “So that’ll be £40.” Amy grimaced. “Sorry!” She smiled apologetically. “But I did mention the price increase, didn’t I?”

  Joan nodded. “That’s fine.” She opened her purse and pulled out two crisp blue £20 notes. Amy took them with a smile. She wished she’d asked for more. “Thank you so much!” She cocked her head to one side while she took the notes and then she put them on her little telephone table in the hall. She got Joan’s plain fawn mackintosh and helped her put it on. Then she looked out for the other client through the little window in the door. For some reason, she didn’t like her clients to bump into each other. It was the idea of them conversing somehow. As Joan was about to leave, Amy caught her elbow. Joan didn’t pull away.

  “Oh, I nearly forgot,” Amy said. “Are you going to come to our Psychic Fair at Caldbeck Tower on Halloween?”

  Joan looked like she hadn’t known about it. She processed the news then said, “Of course. I’d love to.”

  “Do you know where Caldbeck Tower is? I know you’re new to the area.” She gave a laugh.

  Joan nodded. “I know where it is.”

  “Great then. See you there on Halloween!” She delivered the final word with a spooky flourish. Joan smiled indulgently in response. Amy grinned, and then gave a rapid little bird wave of her hand and, with a trill, said, “Bye!”

  Joan left and walked away down the dismal street without turning back. Amy grinned. Under her breath, she said, “I’ll soon have her eating out of my hand. Then she can give me that nice necklace. For starters, anyway,” and closed the door.

  Jill picked Amy up in her gleaming black Audi. Amy tottered out on her heels gripping her black sequined clutch bag that contained her Tarot cards. She was dressed in a black satin dress. She’d thought it appropriate for the occasion — suitably mystical. She lowered herself into the passenger seat.

  Jill said, “You look nice.”

  “You too!” Jill was also dressed in black. However, Jill’s dress was new and designer, unlike Amy’s purchased from the charity shop on the High Street.

  “You excited?” Jill said, pulling the Audi onto the road.

  Amy clapped her hands in girlish delight. “Oh yes! So looking forward to it. Let me get it straight how it works, though; the punters just come round the tables and pick the person they want to do the reading?”

  “Yes, we’re setting up in the Baronial Hall. Honestly, hun, it’s fantastic. It has little snugs with settles. I guess the aristocrats in the old days used to sit and read in them but they’re perfect for doing a reading with a client. Though we’ve got tables, obviously.”

  Amy grinned from ear to ear. “Sounds fantastic!” She stamped her little feet in a girlish tap-dance of joy on the Audi floor.

  “Careful of the car!” Jill said. “It cost a lot.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Amy blushed.

  “Only joking.”

  “Thanks for picking me up by the way. I know it’s out of your way.”

  “Not a problem. I’ll give you a lift back too.”

  “I hope so, or I’d be pretty stuck!”

  It took around ten minutes to drive to Caldbeck Tower. It was on a road out of the village, at the beginning of wilder country. It was said that the site had been a Roman signal tower originally, but the oldest part still standing was the Norman keep. Bits had been added on in Tudor, Stuart and then in Victorian times. It had been sold by the aristocratic family in the 1920s to a man who made his fortune in cattle feed. Then it had been a girls’ school briefly in between the wars; commandeered by the Army in the Second World War, then lain empty for years until bought and renovated in the 1990s. Amy did not know the current owners. She asked Jill if she did.

  Jill said, “Yes, I know Mrs Jones. She’s from abroad. I wondered whether she was a Lesbian because she kept talking about her “friend”, who’s obviously female.”

  “Why does that make her a Lesbian? I’ve got a friend who’s a woman - you!”.

  Jill said, “I never criticise people’s life choices, hun. Walk a mile in my moccasins, I say.”

  “What?” Amy frowned.

  “Never mind.”

  Jill turned off the country road and the Audi’s wheels crunched over the Hall’s gravel drive. The headlights illuminated trees on either side. There was a white shape in a tree, which flew off.

  “An owl!” Amy said. “I bet there are bats too.”

  Jill said, “Oh, don’t say that. I’m scared of bats.”

  “They can’t hurt you.”

  “Vampire bats can.”

  “We don’t have them in this country. They come from South America.”

  Jill said, “I think Mrs Jones is from South America.”

  Amy looked out of the window. Jill’s prattle really got on her nerves.

  The car pulled up in the car park. There were already several cars parked but none as nice as Jill’s. And what had the cow done to deserve that except marry someone with a good job? Life was unfair, Amy thought, but I’ll get what I want in the end.

  There was a light on a pole where they parked but it didn’t do much to illuminate the car park on that dark night. As Amy got out, she saw the mist from the river curling through the trees. She smelled its damp. The Tower loomed up in front of them, built in massive blocks of dark red sandstone. There was a heavy wooden door, banded in iron, which looked hundreds of years old. It was thrown open and yellow electric light spilled onto the forecourt. On either side of the doorway were pumpkin lanterns, their faces cut in scary eyes and jagged, horrific mouths. “Halloween!” Jill said with a grin. Amy rolled her eyes.

  As they walked towards the door, Amy glanced up at the sombre tower and the dark slates of the roof, damp and shining dully from the moisture in the air. Her feet crunched over the gravel. She shivered this time from cold. She wished she’d brought her coat and hoped it wouldn’t be too chilly
inside the Tower.

  “Iris!” Jill saw the lady who had organised the event. She went up and gave her a hug. Iris then hugged Amy and gave her a little kiss on the cheek. “I’m glad you could come, Amy. We’ll have a good turnout tonight. It’ll help your bank balance. I know things have been a little lean for you recently.”

  Amy tilted her head to one side. “Thank you Iris, so much.” Patronising cow.

  Iris patted Jill on the shoulder. “Thank this lady for putting us in touch with her Mrs Jones. What a great venue it is! Come and I’ll show you both the Baronial Hall.

  They walked from the entrance hallway across a floral carpet then down a short corridor, past dark antique cupboards and dressers until they came to the double door of the Baronial Hall. The Hall was lit by black iron chandeliers suspended from the ceiling with frosted electric bulbs shaped to look like candles. It was a good sixty feet long by about twenty feet wide.

  There were mullioned windows with black lead separating the small diamond panes. The glass in the panes was old and thick and it distorted the light shone on it. There was a gallery running around the top of the hall where people could sit, though there was no one there now. The floor was made of old oak floorboards and the walls were panelled in some dark wood. Hanging there were heraldic coats of arms alternating with the antlers of deer and other unfortunate creatures. Jill made a little sad noise when she saw them.

  Pumpkin lanterns were set in nooks and crannies, and on the floor around the walls. Their pumpkin eyes fluttered as the candles inside flickered in an unfelt draught.

  “It’s so atmospheric!” gasped Jill.

  “Can’t you just feel the spirits?” Iris said.

  Amy laughed to herself. They actually believed this crap.

  “Your table’s over there, Amy,” Iris said, pointing. There were around eight tables spaced around the hall, with two chairs each on opposite sides of the table. The tables had cloths of different coloured silks. “My idea,” Jill said. “I borrowed them from that woman in the Market Hall.”

  The cloth on Amy’s table was black. She went over and sat down. The other mediums busied and clucked around their tables getting things ready, setting out their crystal balls and skulls and amethyst angels in preparation for the guests coming in. Amy got her Tarot cards from her clutch bag and drew the pack from the case she kept them in. She laid the cards on the black silk cloth. She loved the pictures on them. As she turned them over, she caressed them with her finger ends and whispered the names of the cards out loud like an incantation: The Empress, Nine of Swords, The Tower Struck Down and Death. Then she grinned. She was glad that reading wasn’t for her! She closed her eyes and slowed down her breathing. She liked to pretend to spend a few minutes in meditation before starting. It was all about playing the part.

  At first, her attention was drawn by the chatting of the other mediums. She heard odd words and snatches of talk. She knew all the women and she smiled to hear them. They talked such rubbish. They were such airheads with their crystals and their energies.

  But then, she got a feeling like she used to get when she first started on this business, when she thought it was all true. It startled her. This wasn’t how things had been for many years now. She’d buried her talents beneath years of bitterness and greed.

  Unnervingly, she felt the energies of the surrounding women. To her once, peoples’ energy was always coloured, deep reds, ochres, yellows, greens even. And here it was again. Colours like a lost innocence. Iris was a pure blue. Jill was orange.

  But there were other energies in this place. She guessed there would be; the Hall was so old. So many souls had lived and died here over two thousand years. She sensed their coming and going. Their happiness and sadness - weddings, fights, funerals, lovemaking, the birth of children. Dogs too. She felt dogs. And there had once been a bear here. A long time back - a dancing bear, perhaps in the Middle Ages? But there was something else. It flitted out of her sensing. It was as if it knew she could sense it and was trying to hide. What was it? She frowned. She couldn’t get hold of it. And then she caught a feeling of cold. It stopped her dead. Something cold and dark and inhuman. It didn’t have the energy of an animal - not a dog or bear. Not even a bat. It was something older than that, more primitive - drier somehow. She shook her head and opened her eyes.

  That was odd: to be sensing things like she used to. She didn’t like it. It reminded her of who she used to be when she was young and soft.

  “Are you all right, dear?” It was Jill, reaching out a sisterly hand. “You look dazed.”

  Amy smiled. “Just getting the vibrations. It’s a funny old place, this.”

  “It’s that indeed,” Jill smiled. “Great for Halloween!”

  Iris clapped her hands. “Ready everyone! The first guests are arriving!”

  Amy tried to smile, but she felt sick. She sensed whatever it was moving again. And it was hungry.

  The evening went well. Amy forgot about her sensations and started making things up again. The punters loved it, like they always did. The pumpkin lanterns burned and Amy smelled their sooty, waxy odour and felt the heat generated by the people and candles in the room. She also smelled the mix of scents from the mediums and their mostly female guests. She had a good night. She gave reading after reading and folded the cash into her little black clutch bag.

  Then Iris clapped her hands again. “Attention, people!” she said. “It’s nearly the witching hour. The witching hour on Halloween!”

  The mediums and the visitors all made long “Oooo!” noises and laughed.

  “So,” continued Iris. “We come to the highlight of our evening.” She turned to Jill who was by the door out of the Baronial Hall. “Can you dim the lights, Jill, please?”

  Jill nodded, and the lights turned down on their dimmer switches, the mock candles in the chandeliers going from bright to dull to worm-like orange filaments to no light at all. The Hall was lit now only by the flickering, and in some cases guttering, candles in the pumpkin lanterns. Their sharp eyes and jagged mouths looked sinister. The light from them moved and shifted and shadows were cast against the dark wood of the panelled walls, making people look large and strange. Amy glanced up to the gallery that ran above her head. She imagined faces in the gloom; the faces of all the people who’d died here, staring down at her. She shuddered.

  It was quiet in the Hall. Someone squeaked a floorboard. Someone else giggled nervously.

  Iris said, “So ladies... and gentlemen,” she smiled at the two or three men who were in the room. “Can we all come together and hold hands for Halloween?”

  People got up. There was a ripple of chatter, nervous and quiet, but excited. Amy stood and the women at the tables near her stood too. Self-consciously they made their way to the middle of the hall. Their faces looked strange in the shifting yellow of the candles.

  “Hold hands now,” Iris said.

  Knowing she had to, Amy reached out to either side and her hands were taken by the women next to her. Iris began to intone. “And now, at the time of the year when the veil between this world and the next is thinnest, we reach out. At this join between summer and winter, we seek the doorway between the worlds. Let that which is hidden come forth. Let the spirits of this place come and speak to us.”

  Amy felt a shiver run up her spine. Spirits and lies were her business, but something here made her uneasy.

  “Oh, no!” a woman on the other side of the circle said.

  Amy jumped.

  “What is it, dear?” Iris asked the woman.

  “There’s something here,” the woman said.

  “Well, that’s good.” Iris raised her head to look into the darkness that clustered above them. “Spirit, make yourself known.”

  Amy’s skin crawled. She didn’t like it. An oppressive weight entered the room.

  “Spirit, if you are here — I offer you my voice to speak,” Iris said.

  There was silence. Tension crawled into the Hall like something comin
g up from cellars or down from attics. Something that lurked here all the nights of the year now had license to show itself. Amy was getting more and more uncomfortable. She felt hot. The woman to her right shifted her feet. Someone coughed.

  Then Iris spoke again. Her voice was now guttural. She spoke rapidly in a torrent of clickings, consonants and rough breathings. It was no language Amy had ever heard before. It didn’t even sound human. It was deep and awful, like an old man stumbling down a corridor to his death, the tapping of his stick, the rasping of his breath, his faltering heart. Iris’s voice was getting louder and more insistent but still the noises made no sense.

  Amy’s hands were clammy holding those of the women on either side. Her head spun as she thought that it didn’t sound like a person’s voice at all; it’s more like the sound an insect would make — some fat, greedy insect.

  And then the chandeliers blazed. Jill stood by the door. She had flicked on the light. She had a wide, false smile on her face. “Well, I think we all agree that was spooky enough for Halloween!”

  Amy glanced at Iris. The older woman was pale and looked unwell. She was being comforted by two of the mediums. What was this rubbish?

  There was a ragged ripple of applause that petered out. Jill said, “It’s past midnight now and the owner who has kindly allowed us to be here tonight, wants her house back!”

  Some of them laughed half-heartedly. Others were throwing each other glances and raising their eyebrows. People started to thread their way out of the hall. Amy heard good nights being said. Jill came up to her. “Well, what the hell was that all about?”

  “Was she putting it on?” Amy said.

  Jill said, “I don’t know, but it wasn’t appropriate. It scared the wits out of some of them. We’ve spent years disassociating psychic mediumship from devil worship and now she does this.”

  “She frightened me,” Amy said. She heard herself saying it like she was some stupid girl. But it was true.

  Jill sighed. “Go and pack up your table. Then go to the toilet and I’ll give you a lift home.”