The Lost Village

by Neil Spring

  ‘Sarah.’

  I flicked my head up to see Price coming through the gate to the churchyard. ‘What’s been keeping you?’ he asked, striding over. ‘You look pale. Have you been cry—’

  ‘Harry, you seem intensely interested in how this village is affecting me,’ I said, meeting his gaze.

  He looked puzzled for a moment, and then a little shifty.

  ‘I know you think Imber holds some profound significance for me, because my father trained here. But my feelings aren’t any of your business and your interest makes me uncomfortable. I’m not an experiment to be scrutinised. Clear?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Now then . . .’ I began, wondering whether I should tell him about the disquieting sounds and the footsteps; but if he knew about the footsteps he would want to stay here, and as far as I was concerned, another minute in this churchyard would be a minute too many. ‘Where next? Imber Court?’

  His eyebrows rose. ‘The old mill, I’d say. Where the sergeant saw that boy. If we set off now, we’ll have plenty of time to return to this churchyard before nightfall.’

  As if that were an encouraging suggestion! With the bells and the footsteps, returning to this spot wasn’t my chief desire. Neither was venturing to the mill. Price was a fiercely determined person, so I knew it was unlikely I could change his mind, but I had to try. ‘I’m not sure you have thought this through,’ I said. ‘To get to the mill, we have to cut through the woods.’

  ‘Correct.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘But what about the unexploded debris? Harry—’

  ‘We’ll take very good care. I’ll look after you.’

  But when had that ever been true? I felt my mouth becoming dry with anxiety. ‘The commander said they searched the mill and found nothing. And he also told us, very clearly, to stay well away!’

  ‘Which is precisely why we shouldn’t.’

  He was alight with curiosity, as if he expected to uncover some great and damaging secret, and I thought, perhaps, I knew why. His argument with Sidewinder had energised him, made him ever more determined to prove there was nothing to fear.

  ‘Sarah, do you want to be the one to explain to the commander – and your mysterious source, whoever that is – that we’ve failed abjectly in our mission? Do you want to go back to Sergeant Edwards’ concrete cell and tell him you came all this way for nothing?’

  I looked at him uncertainly; there was such conviction in his tone.

  ‘I didn’t think so. You need to know, so don’t pretend you don’t. It’s the same longing that drew you to investigate the hauntings at the Brixton Picture Palace.’

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Price turned; began walking away.

  ‘Harry, just wait!’ I said, and he froze. But not because of my instruction, I realised. He was standing next to the lamb carved out of marble – little Pierre Hartwell’s memorial.

  ‘Sarah, come and look,’ he said. ‘Someone has defaced this sculpture.’

  I moved to his side and peered at the side of the lamb sculpture. Focused on the official inscription, I had missed this: a series of words, barely legible beneath a skin of moss and bluish-green lichen, had been etched into the marble.

  ‘Look, it’s just possible to read it,’ Price said, running one finger over each letter. ‘“May God in His mercy punish those who have wronged us; grant it so that His heavenly wrath stains the souls of those who have stained Imber with the blood of innocents.”’

  I knew what it sounded like to me: a curse. Crude and embittered, but a curse nonetheless.

  Price’s eyes met mine. ‘Goodness. Someone had a bee in their bonnet, didn’t they? Write this down, Sarah.’

  Once I had done that, Price recommenced his purposeful stride towards the church gate and the lane that led to the woods.

  It took Price a moment to realise he had left me behind, and when he did, he turned and shot me an impatient glare.

  ‘Well, are you coming?’

  For a moment, thankfully fleeting, I saw the wandering child’s wasted face, his sunken eyes.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ Price said. ‘We’ll be just fine, Sarah. You’ll see.’

  And God help me, I followed.

  – 15 –

  CREEPING INTO DANGER

  The sense of desolation was even more overpowering in the woods. No houses. No sweeping views across the barren valley. And my shoes – low heels suitable for a secretary at a Soho film-publishing house – weren’t made to contend with the thick underbrush.

  Price was up ahead, fighting through the vines and spindly branches. I’d had to remind him more than once that this was a live firing range, impressing upon him the need to go slowly lest we tread on an unexploded shell. I was longing to stop and rest awhile; the morning’s events had left me feeling quite drained.

  The farther we walked, the more uncomfortable I became. My coat kept snagging on branches, as did my skirt. The rutted foot trail ahead of us was on the verge of vanishing under snarling roots and shrubbery. Without a map, we were walking blind, hemmed in by woods that were thicker than we had envisaged when we left the churchyard and ascended the muddy track known as Carrion Pit Lane. There was no guarantee we would find our way back again before nightfall.

  A low tree branch scratched my face, another my hand. Looking about me, I began to feel very anxious, my tiredness bordering on exhaustion.

  ‘Harry, please can we stop for a while?’

  ‘Not far now, Sarah. Keep up!’

  Twigs snapped underfoot; branches jabbed at either side of us. Above, through a thick canopy, dusty shafts of light streamed down, but not enough to chase away the shadows, which only seemed to thicken and bulk, as if warning us to stop, go back.

  I had never been afraid of the dark before, but these woods were making me short of breath and making my stomach churn.

  Price halted. Held up his right hand in a command to stop.

  ‘Danger?’ I asked. ‘Unexploded shells? What?’

  He shook his head. ‘Thought I heard something.’

  Warily, I looked about, peering between the dark trunks. There was no sign of anything much: just the tangled undergrowth and some tall, odd-looking plants with pale stems and white trumpet-shaped flowers that deepened to an inner purple.

  ‘See anything?’ Price whispered.

  I shook my head.

  An unearthly silence. Not even the distant sound of farming equipment above us, on the chalky grasslands of Salisbury Plain.

  ‘Never mind,’ Price said. He waved me to follow on.

  Suddenly, we heard a scream: piercing, anguished, and unmistakably a woman’s.

  I gave a small start and grabbed for Price’s arm. He whirled round, crying, ‘What the devil!’

  As his bulging eyes scanned the trees and dark spaces in between, I listened intently, scarcely drawing breath.

  Nothing.

  I let go of Price. He said, in a low voice, ‘Someone else is on the range.’

  ‘But we haven’t seen anyone,’ I replied. Not only had the commander guaranteed our privacy – indeed, Price had insisted upon it – but I still had an all too vivid memory of the barrier lowering behind us as Sidewinder’s truck kicked up chalk dust and drove away.

  Price didn’t appear to be listening any more; he was staring past me, between the trees. ‘I wonder,’ he whispered, setting his tattered old briefcase squarely on the ground and snapping it open. The lid flipped up, revealing a thermograph, a camera, a bottle of mercury, a sketch pad, pencils and a drawing board. His trademark tools for debunking cases of the paranormal. There was a steel tape measure, plaster, string and tools to seal rooms, doors and windows, and even brushes and powdered graphite for developing fingerprints. And who could forget his trusty bright red Swiss army knife?

  ‘
What are you doing?’ I asked, as Price plucked out a matchstick.

  ‘Sergeant Edwards said he was compelled to strike a match. As if someone had coerced him to do so. Correct?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So let’s use this match as a trigger object. See if we can’t entice those whispering spirits back to meet us.’

  I stared. ‘Harry, you can’t be serious. That’s silly.’

  Price looked at me silently and then he slowly smiled. ‘Sarah. You told me I ought to open my mind. Let’s see if our ghosts are in a sociable mood today, shall we?’

  A sensation of pins and needles brushed over my body.

  ‘Harry, I don’t think this is a wise—’

  He struck the match.

  I froze. Around me, the trees seemed to shimmer, as if I were seeing them through a haze. At first, there was absolute silence. The air had become chillingly cold, freezing, and then I thought I heard, faintly . . . low whisperings.

  I shuddered. Opened my mouth to ask Price if he heard them too, but before I could get the words out, there was a sudden sound to the side of me. Something moving fast, crashing out of the trees. Sprinting.

  I turned. And in that instant I seemed to find myself confronted by the past. I saw a man in uniform. Well built. Broad-shouldered.

  Sergeant Edwards.

  But this wasn’t the horribly burned man we had met at Westdown Camp. This Sergeant Edwards had a smooth and handsome face. And he was holding a can of liquid that smelt very much like petrol.

  Before I could shout for Price, I was overcome by a sickening dizziness as I saw Sergeant Edwards lifting the metal can over his head. The pungent petrol inside began glugging out.

  I saw the oil glistening on his face, his clothes. Smelt the high, sweet fumes.

  ‘Stop!’

  But he was unreachable except to the whispering voices. His eyes had a frozen, bug-eyed look, but they weren’t focused on me. They were fixed ahead of him, on something I couldn’t see.

  He dropped the can and produced a cigarette lighter.

  I was so startled I almost tripped over as I turned to Price, my eyes watering.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I shouted. ‘Harry!’

  A flick of the lighter, a blaze of heat and orange light. Then, a sound destined to haunt my nightmares for decades – a howl of ragged agony.

  The young man dropped to the ground as the flames licked and twirled around him, his arms flailing to beat the fire from his clothes. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The smell of the bubbling fat and skin was vile, like burned liver – a harsh, sickening stench.

  ‘Sarah! Sarah, what on earth is the matter? SARAH!’

  Hands gripped my shoulders tightly.

  My eyes snapped open. I slumped back against a fallen tree and held on to it, pulling in heavy breaths. ‘Didn’t . . . didn’t you see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Sergeant Edwards,’ I managed. ‘Harry, I saw . . . I saw . . . what he did to himself.’

  Price looked blankly bewildered. He had expected something to happen to us out here in the woods, but not this. ‘Just catch your breath, Sarah,’ he said, putting his arm around me. ‘Nothing happened. There’s nothing to fear.’

  I stood that way for a long time, nauseous, faint, trembling, gripping the side of the fallen tree. My head was throbbing, my jaw aching. My mouth was dry and my vision blurred. I struggled to force myself out of the giddy daze, aware that the flesh on my arms was now covered with goosebumps, my hands numbed with an unpleasant tingling sensation. At last Price let me go and stood back.

  ‘You blacked out, Sarah,’ he said grimly. Solemnly. ‘There was no one here.’

  ‘But I saw! Harry, I saw what they made him do.’

  ‘Who?’ Price was looking at me as if I had lost my mind. And maybe I had.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  Sometimes there just aren’t any words.

  ‘Are you ready to continue, Sarah?’

  I blinked at Price, remembering the way the trees had appeared to shimmer around me. The abominable vision had seemed so real; the bitter smell of charred flesh was still in my nostrils.

  The thought was a crazy one, but it was as if I had witnessed a replay of a past event. I told Price as much.

  ‘I strongly doubt that, Sarah.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘The phenomenon you’re describing is called retrocognition. Witnessing past events through extra-sensory perception.’ He eyed me with a cynically contracted brow. ‘Such cases – I mean convincing cases – are extremely rare.’

  I remembered Sidewinder pouring scorn on Price’s objectivity, that he doubted the ghost hunter was ever capable of recognising a genuine paranormal event, and felt myself hardening against his scepticism. ‘If you have a theory, Harry, it had better be a good one.’

  Price nodded, calculating. He asked me, ‘Have you ever read the novel The Hill of Dreams?’

  I shook my head, wondering where he was going with this, and he smiled, content, apparently, with the opportunity to explain.

  ‘The Hill of Dreams tells the tale of a rector’s son, Lucian Taylor, a lad who wanders this world in search of meaning, truth and beauty. One passage stands out in my memory:

  ‘“The form of external things, black depths in woods, pools on lonely places, those still valleys curtained by hills on every side, sounding always with the ripple of their brooks, had become to him an influence like that of a drug, giving a certain peculiar colour and outline to his thoughts . . .”’

  I stared at him long enough for him to see I wasn’t impressed. ‘You think I experienced some sort of – what? Terror-induced hallucination?’ I was indignant. His scepticism was maddening!

  He raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘I have no doubt the experience was real to you. Whether it was real in the objective sense is quite another matter.’

  Maybe he had a point. I knew just as well as he did the effect that an environment with a traumatic history could have on the sensory capability of someone suffering emotional distress. Parapsychologists like him had a name for such phenomena: ‘locational bias’. Locations bleed their peculiar histories, and what we know about them, into our subconscious, causing us to imagine things that don’t objectively exist. Making us hallucinate.

  And yet the vision was so clear. Either way, I decided, there was danger here in these woods and we should leave. Now.

  ‘I can see a clearing,’ Price said, turning. ‘It’s not much farther. Come along!’

  Despite my misgivings, I went with him, feeling ever more certain that we were trespassing now in a bleak and uncertain domain, where the living met the dead; a place of silent loneliness on the borderlands. I was breathing hard as we scrambled through the last thickets into a wide clearing, but then the scene that opened before us quite stole my breath away: a magnificent gully, its rugged walls dropping away from us to a depth of maybe sixty or seventy feet.

  ‘It’s a chalk pit,’ Price said. ‘They’re common on Salisbury Plain, but this must be the most impressive I’ve ever seen. Careful. Stay away from the edge.’

  I had no intention of going anywhere near the edge. Instead, I sank down where I stood, sweeping my skirt and coat under me. Sheltering my hands in my pockets, I sat there for a few moments, the wind whistling down from over the plain.

  Did I hear something else then, carried on that wind? I could have been wrong, but what I thought I heard was a dog barking.

  ‘So . . . Glad you came?’ Price asked eventually.

  ‘Very,’ I said tartly, looking up at him.

  A smile touched his lips. He crouched down beside me. ‘Just like the old days, eh?’

  I nodded. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m coming back to work for you, Harry.’

  The smile vanished. ‘You never worked for me, Sarah. You
worked with me. You and I, we were a team.’

  A team? What about when you left me, pregnant and alone to fend for myself, to run your laboratory on my own? Were we a team then?

  ‘Six years was long enough, thank you, Harry.’

  ‘Six good years,’ he added. And maybe that was true, but only partly.

  At times the work had been darkly exhilarating. I thought back to the night we met, a Saturday evening in 1926, two weeks before my twenty-second birthday. It was the gala opening of his laboratory at 16 Queensberry Place, a house that had the distinct air of a gentlemen’s club. The newspapers, and every guest in attendance, had been promised ‘wonders’, and that was exactly what they got from the medium parading before us on a grand stage. What no one was expecting – including Mother, who had cajoled me into going along – was Price’s dramatic revelation: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I do not believe in ghosts!’

  You could have heard a pin drop. Price was something no one expected: an exposer of frauds. And I was impressed. I hadn’t gone with Mother to keep her company. I’d gone because I was worried she’d squander yet more of the little money we had on dubious spiritualist mediums. She was lost, sick with grief. And as far as I could see, Price and his laboratory offered the closest thing to a remedy.

  That night, after his dazzling public performance, my curiosity conquered reason. I’d wandered off to explore Price’s laboratory for myself: the dark enchantments of his ‘séance room’; the curious trinkets that littered the benches of his workshop, with its bell jars, tool racks, microscopes and cameras; and yes, even the many leather-bound volumes that furnished the handsome bookcases in his private study.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ Price had demanded when he found me. ‘Who are you?’

  I had felt awkward. Helpless. Guilty. Now, six years later, sitting at the edge of that yawning chalk pit, many miles from London, I wondered how we had come to this; how different things would have been if I hadn’t attempted to flatter him that night, remarking how fascinating it must be to work in his laboratory.

  ‘Can you type?’ he had asked.

  I could. Eighty words a minute.