I rented a room from Mrs Hall, a motherly woman in her late fifties. Mr. Hall was a retired sailor. They had two grown daughters in North London and a number of small grandchildren who were close to Mrs Hall’s heart and whose pictures overflowed the mantelpiece. They were pleasant enough lodgings. Everything was, you might say, shipshape and Bristol fashion. To me the décor was rather late Victorian and cluttered with unnecessary knickknacks, down to the sampler proclaiming Home Sweet Home over the fireplace. I would have liked something more severely modern, but it was comfortable and I suppose home-like.
Mrs Hall cooked me a full breakfast every morning, ironed my shirts, and generally made a fuss of me. I was even allowed my own key, for those occasions when I came back late and merry from some gathering. Mr. Hall said little but was friendly enough in his way.
A large parrot completed the family group. There were many odd souvenirs of Mr. Hall’s seafaring days and this was one, like the ebony elephants and inlaid Chinese boxes. It was a red macaw called Long John, and he was to play an unexpected and dramatic part in my narrative. He was allowed to fly freely round the house, and his perch was moved from room to room so he could be with the Halls. He occasionally emitted loud squawks and random words to punctuate the conversation.
I was nervous of that parrot with his scaly legs and long claws. He would look at me fixedly, blinking slowly, reminding me of an old Latin teacher I had who had that expression when formulating some stinging remark on a slow pupil. That beak looked wicked, and I jumped every time he shifted towards me. He was usually inconspicuous, but squawked like a klaxon at odd intervals. Mr. Hall was inordinately fond of him and told me the parrot was a good talker.
Mr. Hall had acquired the parrot in his seafaring days from a bar owner in São Paulo, a Russian who lived in fear of pursuers whom he dared not name. The parrot was his sentinel; Mr. Hall said it could bark like an Alsatian if it saw a burglar. Regular contact with sailors in the bar meant it had also learned profanities in every language on earth.
“If you swear, he could swear back to make your ears drop off,” he said proudly. “Swear at him in Hindoo or Eskimo and he’ll give you it right back in the same language, with some extra.”
I did not see much evidence of intelligence. Mr. Hall would hold up a peanut and Long John would say “Pee-nut!” quite distinctly before it was given him, but those were about the only words I ever heard him utter. Mr. Hall thought this proved his superiority.
“But he’s a wise old bird; he knows when to keep his trap shut,” said Mr. Hall. “He could tell you some tales, he could. But he don’t.”
I was even rude enough to tell him about the Russian Ivan Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes: show the parrot a peanut and you get one reflex, swear at him and you get another. It was all perfectly mechanical. But Mr. Hall just smiled indulgently and said again that the parrot was a wise bird and probably a hundred years old.
In the evenings when I wasn’t out with our set we would sit companionably in the front room. Mrs Hall would iron or darn, or more often knit small garments for the grandchildren. Mr. Hall smoked his pipe and perused the Illustrated London News while I picked through the latest work and read out occasional snatches to illuminate and educate them. They must have thought the pretensions of this young gentleman very amusing.
After a few weeks I was on quite friendly terms with the Halls. I should not have been surprised by Mrs Hall’s invitation to come to church on Sunday. Caught without an immediate excuse, I accepted the offer politely, little realising the vortex that I was allowing myself to be drawn into. Though perhaps events would have turned out as badly if I had never agreed to go to that accursed spot.
I told my friends the next evening while we were gathered round in our usual snug at the Crown public house. Even the girls were with us—yes, we were shockingly modern. But the locals did not seem to mind, but regarded us as some variety of exotic foreigner.
I was met with a general roar of amusement and outrage.
“William, you coward!” hooted Tom. “Where’s your Rational Atheism now?”
“It’s in the nature of an anthropological investigation,” I said, rather coolly.
“Observing the rites and rituals of the tribes of South London,” said Jessica. “It’s easier than going to Samoa. And maybe it’ll be good for your soul.”
“I dare say you won’t find ’em so much different from the Home Counties,” said George. “Just a bit low church for you, maybe.”
“I dare say they won’t be different at all,” said Tom.
“Pevsner is scathing about the church—it’s 1880s build of course,” said Jessica. “But there was an older settlement around there, and churches are often built on Roman temples. So it might just have some pagan roots.”
Jessica’s knowledge of architectural history was compendious.
“Pagan roots?” George raised an eyebrow, causing his monocle to fall out. It was a movement he was practising for comic effect. “You think there’s a coven of Druids there practising the old Religion, like those Welsh fellows?”
“Your namesake was a Druid,” Sophie chipped in. “There was a whole order of London Druids. They got up to some shocking things.”
“Mystic Celtic twaddle,” said Tom. “That Welsh chap in his nightgown is a palpable fraud. And if you can find one single pagan survival in Dulwich, well, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Quod projectus chirothecam!” George declared.
We all looked at him vacantly.
“The gauntlet has been laid down, the challenge made,” he translated. “Will you take it up, William?”
“You’re wagering I can’t find one single example of pagan survival at this church?” I asked. Ecclesiology was not my field, but I was familiar with Durkheim and Graebner, cultural diffusion and inertia. The earlier culture would of necessity leave its imprint on those that came after. There must be something to see, if only the odd carving or Christianised holy well. Also, there was something tickling at my memory, a newspaper story that hinted at pagan practices in Dulwich. I noticed it because it was in the news when I was thinking of taking up the post, and the name caught my eye.
“I should say I could.”
“And the wager is for a hat,” announced George. He had a knack for making things up as he went, and always sounded so reasonable that everyone else would go along with him. By the time you caught up with yourself and started asking questions, George had moved on. “Are you gentlemen agreed? Shake hands on it then.”
I was game—I was damned if I was going to back down. Tom was not going to give way either, and we shook hands over the table. And so it happened that we were both of us damned.
“Who’s the referee?” asked Jessica.
“We’ll form a jury and adjudicate,” said George. “In the event of a tie, the chairman’s vote decides it.” Needless to say, he had slipped on the mantle of chairman.
“We’d better drink to your expedition to darkest Dulwich, old man,” said Tom, good-naturedly rising to buy a round. “You just mind out they don’t turn out to be cannibals.”
II
With my mission in mind and intellectual honour at stake, I looked forward to church on Sunday morning. I had skimmed everything in the school library that touched on pagan influences in the church, and I was armed and ready.
I would like to say that a dark cloud hung over the church, that ichor oozed from the walls, that the niches in the walls were filled with blackened images of obscure saints mutilated in ghastly martyrdom. Those would have been the conventional signifiers.
Instead there was a smell. Many churches have their smell, but this one was different. It was not the drains, as you might expect, nor stale incense, nor even that clinging dampness which hangs like a miasma in so many churches. This one was on marshy ground, and a certain swampiness might have been expected. But it had the smell of a gymnasium, of human sweat, but mixed with something fishy and clinging. It carried a disturbing intimacy
about it, worsened because it was not entirely unpleasant: the half-noxious perfume of an attractive stranger in your face in a crowded railway carriage. You could not escape it.
Apart from the smell, I was troubled by shadows, odd flicks of darkness seen from the corner of my eye that moved on the edge of vision.
During the dull sermon—haven’t we heard enough about Lot’s wife yet?—I entertained myself by taking an inventory of the crowd. They were the usual suburban lot I would have expected, and a credit to this deeply conventional borough.
But there was something peculiar about them. I picked out one old man who was the picture of dementia and thought he must be a prize specimen, until I saw another just like him in the row behind. The pews were a shocking display of senility and degeneration. Some stared open-mouthed if not actually drooling, clutching their hands convulsively as though wringing out washing, or staring up in vague ecstasy. Could there be some asylum nearby within the parish boundary? Or did the place have some special attraction for the insane?
I shook the vicar’s hand afterwards and congratulated him on the turnout. I asked if he knew of any antiquities nearby.
“Are you a journalist?” he asked sharply.
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m just an interested scholar. I—”
He had already moved on to talk to an elderly couple. Afterwards I made a circuit of the church grounds, my feet squelching on the wet turf, finding nothing of interest. There were gargoyles on the corners, oddly flat, angular things, but they were too high to see properly. A man approached me, raising a hand in salute.
“Morning, sir,” he said. He was past middle age; his coat was army surplus, and I guessed he was as well. He had the upright bearing of an old NCO, and the red nose of a man who liked a few drinks, and a few more after that. “Can I help you?”
“I was just looking around,” I said. “I’m a visitor.”
“I’m Dunning, the churchwarden,” he said. “I was wondering, seeing as how Vicar was a bit short with you, and how you’re looking around, whether you might want some assistance.”
“I’d heard there were some ancient remains here.”
“Not exactly,” he said. “But I might be able to help you, perhaps for a small consideration.”
When I looked at him blankly, he carried on.
“It’s just that, given the events what occurred, you won’t find anything on your own. And the vicar doesn’t encourage it. But we’ve got a few minutes while he’s busy with parish business, and a full-guided tour, well, that’d be worth two bob of anyone’s money, wouldn’t you say?” Dunning held out his hand, as bold as anything.
I dropped the coins into his palm. Satisfied, Dunning led me briskly around the side of the church.
“We’ve had one or two visitors round since Mr. Whatley’s demise,” said Dunning.
“Whatley?”
“The gentleman what died in the pit,” he said. “Isn’t that what you were here for?”
“I’m interested in archaeology.”
“And so was Mr. Whatley! You might say that’s what did for him.”
This Whatley had been a local eccentric. He was an old man who lived in a broken-down house near the church and was often seen shuffling round its grounds. He had a long beard and wore a filthy overcoat. He looked like a tramp but had money, and produced old sovereigns from an endless store when he needed to. He lived with his grown-up daughter, a shy woman who was rarely seen. She seemed to live in a kind of trance, and never did housework or anything else that anyone knew of.
Whatley’s chief obsession was a battered, greasy old book. He spent much time poring over it, but jealously closed it if anyone else tried to look. The book had been passed down from his father, and his father’s father, who had a reputation as a wizard of sorts. People said the Whatleys were settled gypsies, the remnant of the old encampment at Gipsy Hill. Whatley’s grandfather could find missing objects, cure animals, dissolve curses, or lift the evil eye. Or so people said. Dunning thought the old man made a decent living from the gullible.
Whatley claimed the site of the church had been sacred since ancient times. There had been three barrows there called “Druids’ Mounds,” which had been levelled when the church was built in the 1880s. There was supposed to be a king sleeping in one of them, but Dunning said the mounds were just dirt. Whatley did not resent the loss of the barrows, but hinted darkly that only his family had the knowledge, passed down in the mouldy book, to control the dark forces held deep under the ground.
A few years previously Whatley had claimed that the “stars were changing” and the end times were coming. Whatley’s outlook changed too and he became malicious. He would stand on the street, jeering at passers-by and telling them they were all doomed, and that they would all be swept away when the seals were opened. More than once he was picked up by the police, blind drunk, claiming to be John the Baptist or possibly Joseph of Arimethea—he wasn’t sure which.
Whatley became obsessed with the grounds of the church, probing at the turf with a metal rod, looking for something.
“Plenty of times I had to warn him off,” said Dunning. “But there wasn’t any harm in him, and what could I do? He started creeping back in the middle of the night, and he kept poking and poking around everywhere.”
“But what on earth was he looking for? Buried treasure?”
Dunning explained that Whatley was searching for something described in his book, something buried since before the barrows, something important and dangerous. But his maps were useless because the barrows had gone and he had no other landmarks to help find the exact spot. By this time I had walked with Dunning to a lean-to beside the church which was evidently a tool-shed. He went inside and came out a minute later with a shovel and an electric torch.
“Well then,” said Dunning. “Can you see it yet, what Whatley found? Look very close now.”
He was enjoying my bafflement. I scanned the churchyard again and shook my head.
Dunning took two paces forward and used his shovel to lift a section of turf perhaps two feet square, a little paler than the rest of the grass. Under it was an old signboard used as a cover. Dunning lifted it to reveal an open manhole. I could see a solid floor several feet below.
He gave me a hand as I lowered myself through the opening, gingerly because I was not dressed for scrambling about. I dropped the last foot or so and found I was on a low stone plinth. He passed me down the electric torch.
I stepped down, and as my eyes adjusted I saw I was in a pit, or more properly a small stone chamber. It was about eight feet across and barely high enough to stand up in. The walls were stonework, smooth stones of all different shapes and sizes fitted together precisely without mortar.
The first thing that struck me was that the acoustics were all wrong. That place swallowed up sound. Many years later I was shown around an anechoic chamber, and it had a similar effect: a total deadening of sound, and a feeling of pressure on your eardrums. Except that sounds were not totally muffled; instead there were a few odd echoes, as though from a much bigger space.
As I moved the beam of the torch the place seemed to shift slightly as though seen through water, and for a moment I felt dizzy. There were no true horizontals or verticals. Then as I turned around I saw that it was not just a chamber but a tunnel disappearing off into the dark. My jaw dropped, but before I could grasp what this meant the perspective jumped and I found I was looking at a blank stone wall.
The chamber was empty, with smooth stone all round, the only feature the low stone plinth in the middle. As I looked more closely, the walls seemed to be daubed with faint markings in greenish chalk, but the light from the torch was too faint to distinguish them.
“Very curious, ain’t it?” Dunning called from above. “That’s where I found old Whatley, lying right where you are. He was dead, dead as a doornail.”
The chamber was perfectly clean, and in spite of the damp outside it there was not a drop of water. But it was
an uncomfortably close place, like being in a tomb or a coffin, and so very alien and disorienting. I signalled to Dunning, and he gave me a hand and hoisted me out.
“What is that pit?” I asked, dusting myself off. “Who made it—it’s not part of the church surely?”
“It is not,” said Dunning. “All we know is, it wasn’t there when they built the church fifty years ago. Who built it, and why…” He shook his head. “Storeroom for stolen goods, I should say. Robber’s cave sort o’ thing. There used to be a lot of gangs around here, all engaged in burglary and the like. And who’d think of looking for the loot in a churchyard?”
“It feels like a strange old tomb, or a temple,” I said.
“Maybe to you,” said Dunning. “But one thing it isn’t is old. They surveyed all this when they built the church, and they levelled the site. They couldn’t have missed something one foot below the surface, could they now?”
He replaced the wooden board and the turf that covered it.
“Old Whatley must have had trouble getting in—his feet were never right—and he never got out. His heart couldn’t take it. So I found him here the next morning.”
“How awful,” I said.
“I was at Wipers, sir,” Dunning said shortly. “That was what you would call awful. But Whatley…he was no more to me than a fish on a slab. That was the end of him all right. But it wasn’t the end of the story.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 2