by Neil Spring
Contents
Praise for the Author
About the Author
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Note
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE – 1 –
– 2 –
– 3 –
– 4 –
– 5 –
– 6 –
– 7 –
– 8 –
– 9 –
– 10 –
– 11 –
PART TWO – 12 –
– 13 –
– 14 –
– 15 –
– 16 –
– 17 –
– 18 –
– 19 –
– 20 –
– 21 –
– 22 –
– 23 –
– 24 –
– 25 –
– 26 –
PART THREE – 27 –
– 28 –
– 29 –
– 30 –
– 31 –
– 32 –
– 33 –
– 34 –
– 35 –
– 36 –
PART FOUR – 37 –
– 38 –
– 39 –
– 40 –
Acknowledgements
Also Available
Stay in Touch
Landmarks
Cover
Praise for the Author
Praise for Neil Spring:
‘Explosive’
Daily Express
‘A deft, spooky psychological drama based on a true story’
Daily Mail
‘Surprising, serpentine and clever’
Sunday Times
‘Close the curtains, pull up a chair, open a book – and prepare to be pleasantly scared’
Metro
‘There’s nothing like a good ghost story . . . Neil Spring is Agatha Christie meets James Herbert’
Stephen Volk
‘A triumph of creativity . . . the conclusion will shock and amaze you’
Vada Magazine
‘Irresistible . . . Spring has a wicked turn of phrase’
SFX
‘Spring weaves a dark web of romance, deceit and a lingering curse’
Metro
‘Genuinely spine-chilling’
Light Magazine
‘A gloriously spooky tale, perfect for dark autumn nights’
Netmums.com
About the Author
Neil Spring is represented by Curtis Brown, one of the world’s leading literary and talent agencies. In 2013, he published The Ghost Hunters, a paranormal thriller based on the life of Harry Price. The Ghost Hunters received outstanding reviews and has been adapted into a critically acclaimed television drama for ITV. His second novel, The Watchers, is also in development for television. The Lost Village is his third novel. Neil was educated at the University of Oxford. He is Welsh and lives in London.
Also By
Also by Neil Spring
The Ghost Hunters
The Watchers
Title
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2017 by
Quercus Publishing Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2017 Neil Spring
The moral right of Neil Spring to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78429 862 3
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook by CC Book Production
Cover design © 2017 Leo Nickolls
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
Dedication
For Owen Meredith
Note
This is a work of fiction, although the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain is very real – a ghost town out of bounds, abandoned at the outbreak of the Second World War. For the novel to work, it was necessary to change the date of this abandonment to 1914, and although some characters are indeed based on historical figures, I have taken liberties with place names and historical events to transport readers to a place my characters were able to explore. But Imber truly is a creepy location: remote, dangerous and eerily deserted . . . who knows, perhaps there really are ghosts in that mysterious village. It’s likely that in the story that follows, you will meet more than a few of them.
Contents
Praise for the Author
About the Author
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Note
Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
– 1 –
– 2 –
– 3 –
– 4 –
– 5 –
– 6 –
– 7 –
– 8 –
– 9 –
– 10 –
– 11 –
PART TWO
– 12 –
– 13 –
– 14 –
– 15 –
– 16 –
– 17 –
– 18 –
– 19 –
– 20 –
– 21 –
– 22 –
– 23 –
– 24 –
– 25 –
– 26 –
PART THREE
– 27 –
– 28 –
– 29 –
– 30 –
– 31 –
– 32 –
– 33 –
– 34 –
– 35 –
– 36 –
PART FOUR
– 37 –
– 38 –
– 39 –
– 40 –
Acknowledgements
Also Available
Stay in Touch
Prologue
I first saw the village when I was ten years old. Before the K
eep Out and Danger signs went up. Before the high fences with their coiled crowns of barbed wire.
It was a Saturday afternoon in the appalling winter of 1914, and my father hadn’t yet been called away to the battlefields – to his doom. He squeezed my hand as we stood in the drifting snow next to a low wall of mud and rubble that skirted the hilly churchyard.
‘I’d like you to remember this place, Sarah,’ he said solemnly. ‘You remember its name?’
Imber. A scatter of lonely dwellings nestled in a valley on Salisbury Plain.
I suppose at some point on our journey from London we must have glimpsed an ancient mound or stone circle, but if we did, I can’t remember. Mostly what I recall from that day is a pub, a manor house and a jumble of whitewashed thatched cottages. And the funeral bells, of course.
‘Why did we come here, Father?’
I’m sure he wanted to tell me, but a war had begun and secrets were secrets. He turned towards the church, destined to outlive everything else in this place, and sadness clouded his eyes.
‘Sarah, my angel, if ever we are parted, if you should find yourself alone, then close your eyes and remember this place. I’ll always be here.’
‘But what’s special about this village?’
He hadn’t brought me to attend a funeral, but it was the sudden approach of a funeral car that stole my father’s attention. A few villagers, most of them women, stopped and watched as the hearse pulled up quietly outside the churchyard gate, where a circle of mourners had assembled. The snow, falling more heavily now, obscured our view of them a little, but two figures stood out: a thin, stony-faced man of middle age with a crow-black hat that rose like a column; and, beside him, a woman in full mourning attire, her shoulders shuddering as she wept.
It would be eighteen long years before I truly understood that woman’s grief. Before I learned all too well the relentless suffering of a parent who has lost a child.
As the undertaker lifted a tiny lead and bronze casket from its bed of flowers, my father removed his hat, and a couple of elderly women passing us in the street crossed themselves. It occurred to me then how sad and peculiar it was that more of the villagers weren’t displaying similar gestures of respect for one of their own, especially one so young. On the contrary, most of the villagers were drawing away, their faces grim. Heads down, shoulders up, casting their gaze in any direction but the church gate and the mourners huddled there.
Did I see something more than detachment on those faces? Guilt, perhaps? Fear?
Certainly, there was no glimmer of prescience for what was to come. For how could any in this thriving farming community know that all of them, every man, woman and child, would soon be forced to leave their homes, and that their village would vanish from every map.
Some forgot about that nowhere place at the foot of the valley. Even me. Until, of course, I was made to remember. Not by anyone living.
But by a dead man.
PART ONE
HOW THE MATTER AROSE
A house is never still in darkness to those who listen intently; there is a whispering in distant chambers, an unearthly hand presses the snib of the window, the latch rises. Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.
J. M. BARRIE, The Little Minister
– 1 –
THE REVENANT
October 1978
I am haunted by a man who told stories for a living. This cantankerous, ill-tempered and selfish man – the unlikely father of my lost child – is the reason I believe in the supernatural. I know now that death is not the end of life, and I know spirits walk the earth, because of Harry Price.
I saw him tonight.
Not in the flesh – that couldn’t have been. My old companion’s tombstone is already leaning and choked by ivy. All that remains of that notorious magician, scientist and showman is a date and a name.
And yet, I saw him.
A woman in her mid-seventies should be able to tell what is real and what is fantasy, but as I sit here at my desk, my fingers stiff and painful and swollen from arthritis, an icy coldness creeping up my legs, I have reached a conclusion: some stories are never finished. Some voices insist on being heard, even after death. Harry Price’s voice is one of them.
Here’s what happened. Shortly after nine o’clock, I was in the kitchen at the back of our clifftop cottage, preparing to wash the dinner dishes. Vernon, my husband, was next door in the living room, listening to music on the radio. Karen Carpenter was singing, her floating voice reminding me that we had only just begun. The song raised a smile, which quickly contorted into a grimace, for as I plunged my hands into a cloud of soapsuds in the sink, I caught sight of a flickering light through the window – and my stomach became painfully tight.
The flickering light was moving, bobbing out of the thick darkness, towards me.
I stood in rapt stillness at the sink, looking at the light with an escalating sense of dread. I wanted to leave the room but felt strangely compelled to stay. It didn’t occur to me that there might be some mundane explanation for this light – perhaps someone with a torch roaming the fields; I just instinctively knew there was something unnatural about it. But it wasn’t the light that made me gasp for breath. What did that was the naked light bulb overhead, buzzing and flickering as if from a surge of power.
I looked up at it – and it exploded.
Instinctively, I flung my hands upwards, to protect my face from the shower of glass. A second passed, two, while I blinked away the dazzling flash, and then I removed my sodden hands from my hair and looked around the kitchen. Back to the window.
And saw that I was no longer alone.
A dark form was in the windowpane, brooding just over the reflection of my right shoulder. Immediately, I recognised the broad shoulders, the black fedora tipped over his eyes. And I knew, right away, that this spectral form was not an illusion, but the image of a departed soul.
Harry.
I might have turned around then, to confront him, but I was transfixed by his menacing reflection – so clear against the pressing dark.
He looked ancient. Haggard. His skin the colour of old wax. Shiny, stretched over the bone. But it was unmistakably him: the domed, balding head, the pointed ears, the bushy eyebrows and pronounced nose. And those steely eyes locked on mine.
The first time I peered into those cold blue eyes, aged twenty-two, it wasn’t just suspicion I saw there, but an intense passion that had made me tingle with excitement.
What did I see now? A look of aching sadness. And something else: desperation.
‘Harry,’ I whispered. ‘What do you want?’
His mouth was moving, but there was no voice.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why have you come?’
This time, when he spoke I heard it. No more than a whisper – in the air, perhaps, or in my mind, drawn from my memory.
‘Swear to me, Sarah, never to tell . . .’
Then, when I said nothing, only stared, full of bewilderment, at his melancholy reflection, he mouthed one more word: a name. A name that I hadn’t heard in such a long time, and that I had hoped never to hear again.
I spun around to confront him – why that name, after all these years? – and saw . . . nothing. Just an empty kitchen.
A fire crackling in the grate.
And my own breath, frosting in the crisp air that should have been warm.
*
‘What kept you?’ Vernon said, when I finally wandered into the sitting room, trembling and pale. His hearing isn’t so good these days. Perhaps, because of the radio, he hadn’t heard the light bulb pop, but I was a little relieved. I had no wish to tell him of the dreaded apparition that had vanished from my sight.
‘Sarah?’ Vernon watched me with puzzled interest from his lumpy armchair next to the radio, a newspaper spread over his lap. ‘So
mething the matter?’
I paused. The memories were there, cautiously shut away, and they would come if bidden. But that would mean inviting them in, and I didn’t know if I wanted to remember. These were ugly memories. Dangerous. As jagged as shrapnel.
No, a voice somewhere in my head whispered. Remember, Sarah – when you consider the abyss, the abyss considers you.
Better to say nothing. Trick of the light, that’s what Vernon would say. Trick. Of. The. Light. As if four short, ordinary words could so effectively explain an experience so extraordinary.
But then again, perhaps there was something in that. Perhaps I had experienced some sort of a waking dream. A vision. Would it be so surprising? Only days earlier I had read a review about a new biography on the man. No wonder Harry Price had walked back into my mind!
That man.
That impossible man.
People have asked me, ‘Who was he really, Sarah?’ and, even now, the answer remains elusive, but I suppose the simplest answer is this:
Harry Price was a ghost hunter. Loathed and distrusted by many, he was also a showman, whose charisma and energy was second only to his inscrutable persona. It was his lifelong interest in magic that led him into the study of psychical research – driven by a noble need, as he saw it, to debunk the fraudulent claims of spiritualist mediums in a country where the shadow of grief fell long, after the Great War. Detecting fraud became his passion. His obsession. And in time, it became mine – although less so when I realised he was himself capable of the very crimes he sought to expose. Blatant fraud. Trickery. Lies.
Until the moment his body was found in 1948 – slumped over his writing desk, a pen in one hand, a cursed watch chain in the other – he was a wretched victim of his own making. Haunted. By the memory of the son he never knew, the son I eventually misled him into believing I had aborted, and by his elaborate deceptions.
Now, once again, those deceptions were creeping into my life.
‘Sarah?’
The questions were brewing in Vernon’s eyes. He had taken off his reading glasses and was watching me with uncomfortable scrutiny. I turned away from him, feeling the eerie stirrings of déjà vu. The last time he saw me like this I had paced the house for days before barricading myself in the study, where I finally took up my pen and scratched out a manuscript: the account of how a young woman accepted the dubiously privileged position of confidential secretary to the most fascinating, infamous figure in psychical research, only to fall hopelessly into his orbit.