Countess Lucy And The Curse Of Coberley Hall

by Guy Sheppard

Pukes dark brown, soupy liquid into her disposable grey cardboard bowl. Before she’s sick she rocks like a child and gives a soft moan. Doesn’t want to talk. Too sleepy. One eye permanently closed. Can’t see very well anyway, not even with her glasses on. Can make out vague shapes only, she says. They cross her retina day and night, like cobwebs, blood and ghosts.

  Smacks her parched lips and manipulates her mouth in dry, parched way. Water tastes awful. Can’t settle – neither happily asleep nor out of pain.

  No longer wired to an overnight drip. Skin looks loose, wrinkly. Deceptive because legs are so swollen. She would like to go into the garden one last time. Too ill. Too weak. Face only a shadow of what it was. Bony. Angular. Like a man’s. Like her father? Lips unsmiling – tense. Inner battle going on. At one level she has given up and yet wants constant reassurance.

  Suddenly she touches my arm very softly yet urgently.

  ‘Please, Colin, be careful. Don’t let me lie where I can be found.’

  ‘Haven’t I said? I’ll bury your remains wherever you wish.’

  Whereupon she grips my arm quite savagely.

  ‘Not in the air and not in the ground.’

  *

  I woke up shouting.

  Throwing off my counter-pane, I rushed to strike a match and light a candle. But wrong was I not and most definitely was that scream not mine. The clocks struck six in the morning. I pulled on my slippers and dressing-gown and made my way shiveringly on to the chilly landing. That cry had come from the direction of Lord Hart’s bedchamber. Clearly the séance had given him bad dreams, too.

  Better mind my own business, I thought, or else invite more embarrassing scenes on his part?

  Yet something in his voice sounded so real, so unlike any night terror. Following the eye of white light cast by my candle along the panelled walls, I disturbed mice and spiders. Not even Sara was up and about yet, remaking fires. Otherwise the house was a silent maze of impenetrable gloom.

  I entered the great chamber. There I rocked on warped oak floorboards whose unseasoned wood had long ago dried out so unevenly. The room felt chilly and unloved as if the soul had gone out of it. Sure enough, its fire was cold, white ash in its grate. Pompous, plaster pomegranates bulged like boils along a frieze, as did several grotesque jackdaws wearing cock-eyed gold crowns, if only to comment on the vanity of men.

  ‘Really,’ I said, giving myself a scare, ‘it’s too much. Why can’t the stupid fellow simply shut up?’

  Framed in misty mirror-glass that was set into the painted wood above the chimney piece, I seemed to float and revolve. I felt drugged, not drunk suddenly. On one very large table lay the remains of a meal but on another, smaller one his lordship had set out his board, draughts and dice ready for a game of backgammon. The pieces gathered dust where someone had yet to move them back or forwards. Clearly this was where George sat in a room still reserved for the best of occasions. Between this and the bedchamber lay another of the house’s small, but elegantly furnished withdrawing rooms, I discovered. A dreadfully musty smell came from its faded tapestries as I crept closer to all the interminable moaning and groaning now coming from beyond the next door.

  I could make out the wail of words, but few of the words wailed.

  I went to lift the latch on the door somewhat gingerly when through it barged a tall, powerfully built figure. Dressed in worn-out clothes and odd boots, he barred my way. In his hand was a green, floppy hat trimmed with feather, I noticed. My candle lit his sore, red-rimmed eyelids. One stone-blind pupil blanked me totally. The other, shiny iris reflected my own in a film of blood that was streaked and spotted. It could have been the eye of a lunatic.

  But deceived was I not and very quickly did I scream. The pace at which the dishevelled figure moved verged on the manic. From his harelip protruded a sharp tooth between incisors and molars like a fang. Its matching canine was missing. Round his neck was a priest’s humeral veil whose oblong silk corners he clutched like someone who felt perpetually cold. My mind ran riot. Those could have been my stepfather’s broad, rubbery lips, the day he half bit my ear off. So much larger than life did he appear that it was like coming face to face with a Wild Man from Ancient Britain. He was a child’s worst bogy man, bogle or boggard.

  ‘What the hell!’ I cried. ‘What have you done to Lord Hart?’

  At which he seemed genuinely puzzled. When two strangers gazed at each other it had to be because there was somebody or something that joined them together. One of us was looking for a missing link or he had simply forgotten. Some foul thing from hell he might have come to resemble, but in painful slow motion he struggled to mouth remnants of his mother tongue. He tried to remember what words to use from his former existence, I fancied:

  ‘You do mistake me, sir.’

  I went to seize hold of him but was instantly throttled in return. I was face to face with the man I had seen at the scene of Patrick McGuinness’s death. But that revelation afforded me no comfort. His scornful eyes were such a shock to me that it posed a challenge to my own humanity. How had the dreadful loneliness in his face not struck me before? Gasping, I fought against such feelings of heart-felt pity, sympathy and general concern – my own.

  Next minute he dashed me aside. I heard heavy boots tread the floors and flee upstairs, back to the long gallery or attics. I listened for jingling metal, like spurs.

  All candles in the bedchamber had been knocked over and I was forced to use the light on my phone. Lord Hart sat bolt upright in bed in a mess of black pyjamas and blankets. He clasped his hands tightly together in prayer at the tip of his chin, his wild eyes stared straight ahead. He appeared to see right through me.

  Of my own pitiable look he was oblivious. Raising one of his arms, I used his wrist to dab drool from his mouth with his sleeve.

  ‘Did you think that man was your brother?’ I asked, still choking and coughing.

  He made no reply, but horror continued all over his face. His cheeks had gone deathly white and his lips were grey.

  ‘Er, did you recognise him, at all? Was he even like Philip?’

  He gave a brief nod. No blood spattered his bed, no obvious wounds lacerated his chest or arms, yet he had been struck dumb as if by some terrible blow.

  ‘I have an idea he’s still in the house,’ I said and left him to relight his own candle as I took one for myself.

  Little else could I do when he still suffered from such a compelling and disturbing mental impression. To say of him that he had simply mistaken one man for another was insufficient.

  *

  The higher I mounted the great staircase, the more the sharp-toothed monkeys and priapic beasts crawling up the banisters gaped at me in wonder. Perhaps they were not trying to amuse anyone after all, I thought, perhaps they were frozen in a pain of their own. It took my own shock to see it: their exquisitely carved eyes, teeth and tongues captured a terrible moment frozen in time long ago, on the day the house had first sunk into sorrow?

  There was no sign of anyone in the long gallery but the stairs, it turned out, climbed further. For steps to be so widely and so beautifully fashioned from best oak this high in the house was clearly unusual. The builders had intended guests to climb all the way to the rafters.

  When one man had another’s nightmare rudely visited upon him against his will he could no longer dismiss it as an illusion of illness, not even his own, he had to admit that it might have some objective existence. When ghosts inconveniently ceased to be merely apparent or nominal, the most entrenched sceptic had to face facts about life and death free from prejudice and convention, he had to try to see what actually underlay any comparison.

  Besides, I owed the bastard a punch in the face.

  The staircase led nowhere. Baffled, I turned to retreat when the light from my candle lit up the wall at which the steps ended so abruptly. Etched into the stone was the definite outline of a door, long since bricked up and painted over. By calculating where I was on the west side of the house, it was
possible to imagine that this door had originally been designed to give access to the roof. Beyond the blank bricks I should have been able to enter a flat-leaded walkway to give myself splendid views over the walled pleasance garden and clear view of the stars.

  Except the extension to the house had never been built. My quarry could not have escaped through there, I realised.

  How many other hopeful promenaders or astronomers had stood before this door to a world forever beyond reach?

  Perhaps Countess Lucy had simply run out of money?

  *

  Back in my icy bedchamber I swept aside the heavy red arras that led into the closet. To my alarm, a chair lay on its back close to the desk. My eyes settled on a battered leather-bound volume of an old book newly fetched from the library. Hastily abandoned lay a pair of clumsy looking glasses with round lenses. I picked them up and tried them on. Mounted in a double spectacle frame made of bone, the lenses were thicker in the middle of the glass than the edges and although useless for distance viewing could enlarge the sight of print on a page. An ingenious semi-circular spring kept these ugly monstrosities on my nose while two green ribbons secured them with loops round my ears.

  On the desk sat a woman’s spectacle case engraved with Madonna and child and four ugly angels. Whoever had just been reading the book had been rudely interrupted, but not by me.

  Written by Christopher Marlow and Thomas Nash, its crinkled vellum pages stood open at the suicidal lover’s lament for Aeneas in ‘The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage’.

  Fresh underlining sparkled where a Dutch quill had been used to draw attention to Dido’s last words both passionately and violently:

  ‘Here lye the Sword that in the darksome Cave

  He drew, and swore by to be true to me.’

  Still dissolving in the black ink was a tear.

  *

  A moment later, I felt a fresh chill on my neck. The window’s blank metal ventilation panel stood open to let in a blast of winter.

  I marched over to shut it and in doing so looked down onto the four grassy squares of formal gardens that stretched directly below me into darkness. For my own trepidation it was at first impossible to account. Then I saw him limping along a pale gravel path in the thickening mist close to the house, a hunched, brooding figure who buried his head in his rat-coloured cloak as he escaped through the gate that led to the church and its graves.

  I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted even as he passed behind the veil.

  ‘You’re no wraith, you live and breathe.’

  *

  With daylight came a decision. The mist clung to the crenelated battlements of Coberley Hall, mischievously adding to its promise of seclusion and secrecy. It was not a menacing brume, entirely. Yet neither could I delay but a sense of menace seemed to grip me.

  A few roseate tints of pale sun, instead of lighting my progress, reddened the lime render like bruises on the courtyard walls. Such livid contusions in the cement were the surface manifestation of some internal wound. Each rosette bloomed bloodier and bloodier as I went by.

  Hazy myself, I tried not to stray in the haze. Nor was I too drunk, though surely could I not deny that I had drunk too much last night.

  As for his lordship, I left him a ludicrously, cantankerous bore. Locked in his bedchamber, he sat on a chair and levelled his gun’s thirty-two inch barrels at anyone who tried to enter.

  Frankly, I was not sorry to unlatch the postern door and set foot in the lane. Out here at least, the day was slightly less grey, the sun less dissolved behind so much vapour suspended in the air. On glancing up I glimpsed a figure seated at the gatehouse window.

  To the best of my belief it was the same face as before, although my eyes scarcely discerned any actual features. I waved, cautiously. Such intense scrutiny of my departure could but speed the departure itself. Then I rolled back my cuff to uncover my watch. Only now, when I was safely outside my own walls, did the seconds and minutes consent to turn past four p.m., that first recorded moment of my arrival. I tried my phone. It did the same.

  Half way up the hill I paused again in order to ring Peter Slater.

  ‘You want me, Inspector?’

  ‘H’m, well, yeah. You were right. Something’s happened.’

  25

  Inch-long thorns clawed at me from black hedges along the lane, hideous branches leaned low from bare trees to pluck at my progress. Where one shape shifted to another in the fog the road disappeared into virtually nothing. I was literally my own compass in so much empty whiteness.

  Straightening my heavy cap on my head, I soon felt my face acquire a rawness and coldness unacceptably numbing. Hardly ever did I avert my stare from things I saw or expected to see at any moment. Although I still held out hope of explanations that were positive and rational, it took considerable concentration not to let the smirking miasma prey on my mind. Actual fear linked arms with the archetypal. Unseen fields had a grave stillness about them, especially when my boots were the only sound in the silence.

  Not a single bird sang. It was ridiculous but true: never was a man more frightened than by himself.

  I stopped dead. Something about the size of a small dog hopped about in the lane not far in front of me. Armed and clothed as I was in a dead man’s tweed shooting jacket and dark olive moleskin breeks, I felt obliged to show what it took to maintain nature’s natural balance. For, was I not now steward of this land and arbiter of all that lived or died within its bounds?

  Deftly, I pressed two orange cartridges into the breach of my gun. The greenest of countrymen should be able to blast this over-sized rabbit to pieces, I thought. I took time to take aim.

  I was not in the least unnerved, except in so far as the fog made mysteries of everything. Damp, white air silvered the creature’s delicate whiskers and sprinkled its reddish back with pearls. Its every breath dissolved in smoky clouds, much as mine did. Revolving its long black ears my way, it suddenly rose to attention. I saw it sit up like a stiff little soldier to fix me with its gaze. Still it went on chewing green shoots stolen from my field. Never had a look been so brazen and unflinching, but honestly there was something else in that gaze that spoke where words failed.

  That was no rabbit, it was a hare.

  Then it vanished, before I could tighten my finger on the trigger. Together with the Devil’s assistance, it raced in leggy bounds too fast for my befogged eyes to follow. With its escape came deliverance. In Countess Lucy’s time such a red-eyed pest would have been regarded as a messenger or spirit.

  *

  Oddly, no one was there to meet me at Father O’Connell’s derelict bungalow. The heavy, rusty chain round the gatepost indicated that although padlocked, its days of guarding something were at an end.

  That said, I climbed over.

  I began my advances cautiously. When someone went in search of an ogre that had the strength of a gorilla, the most sceptical man had to credit such a creature with some physical or practical qualities. Thanks to my own bruising experience, I did for a moment try to set aside my former uncertainties to explore a different sort of logic. Of heaven and hell, I was not yet persuaded. Nevertheless, I had to remind myself, soberly and not in some phantasmal way, not to envisage the face of my stepfather. I said it again – we scared ourselves most.

  *

  In starting to poke about like this, I was soon ankle-deep in things left behind. Resembling a long row of stables, rickety wooden sheds had seen their upper doors torn off by gales since the great abandonment. They lay in a line at my feet like broken sails. I was looking at a place once used for rearing pheasants on an industrial scale. The shadow of death still outdid the decay.

  Even so, for a moment, I had half a mind to survey the priest’s former home, take this occasion to assess its real estate value. While I was rightful lord of the manor, my future remained contingent upon the rapid acquisition of some serious cash. Throw in a field or two and I might yet put New Farm, as it was once called, on th
e market for a million.

  If all the paraphernalia of bird breeding had been discarded in the overly hasty departure so, too, had somebody’s books and clothes. A man’s belongings rotted among a tangle of spare, bone-white ceramic heating elements for the sunlamps that had incubated thousands of eggs. That I could hear rats was not encouraging. At the same time, that unpleasant sensation of not being alone got on my nerves. Snapping shut the breach of my gun, I felt spied upon and spun round.

  Sitting sentry-like on the grass by the gate, the red-eyed hare observed my foggy peregrination from afar.

  *

  Rats or no rats, I had to give that noise due credence. It was coming from somewhere inside the barn next door.

  On my way there I tripped over a Bible. Tossed violently aside, it lay among a compressor, empty gas cylinders, rusty tools and several half-full jerrycans of fuel. Somebody had dragged a vinyl record player and washing machine from the bungalow, it seemed, in an act of supreme carelessness. I gave the Bible a gentle flip with my toe. Nothing so singular and mysterious could be regarded without some fascination.

  Inside the front cover was a name. It was Father O’Connell.

  *

  As soon as I entered the very long barn I found myself among various wooden stalls, piles of creosoted timber and rotting haystacks. This far into the interior, the roof turned everything into a tunnel.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I demanded, none too happily.

  Still fighting the dictates of my imagination, I hardly dared suppose who it might be that moved beyond the wall of darkness.

  Surely that was someone climbing down the wall?

  Then I heard it, that pattering sound of claws or spurs against the rafters. They were restless, agile, prehensile, as of some creature whose fact I no longer regarded as fiction. I edged nearer. That was to challenge whatever obscene tactics my mind could yet muster. It wasn’t just a few birds. I still actually hoped that, with the light behind me, this hideous awakening was somehow myself projected in shadow. That said, there was no denying an all-seeing and mindful malevolence.