The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert

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 anyway 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 line 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 along 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 t
ight, 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.