The Lost Village

by Neil Spring

  ‘Come to Papa,’ said Hartwell, in a thick, tear-clotted voice. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you so. Here, let me feel the touch of your hand . . .’

  I swallowed, touched by the father’s words and chilled by the physical form of the dead boy I thought I now recognised as Imber’s wandering child.

  Taking quick inhalations, I plucked up one of the hand-held mirrors from the table in front of me and angled it to catch the light of the centre candle, aiming it directly at the inhuman thing, to discern its features more clearly.

  And now I saw with vivid horror the jet-black hair, hanging tangled around a narrow face that was gaunt and sunken in; I saw the charcoal eyes, the painfully protruding ribs. He looked roughly seven or eight years old.

  It was him. Hartwell ran a trembling hand over the figure’s shoulder.

  He told us afterwards that the skin was soft but freezing, and so clear it was almost translucent; that when he pressed his ear against the apparition’s breast, he could hear his heart beating and feel his breathing.

  ‘I – I don’t understand,’ Price was muttering, his head still shaking in confusion.

  I believed, then, his iron scepticism had been breached. It was melting before my eyes.

  ‘How? How?’ He gave a deep, shuddering sigh and straightened in his chair. ‘May I question him?’ Price asked Hartwell, and the child’s father nodded keenly.

  ‘Where do you live, Pierre?’

  No answer.

  ‘What do you do there?’

  No answer.

  ‘Do you play with other children?’

  No answer.

  The figure never looked at Price. It just stared at Hartwell with dead eyes. Then Price asked a final question, leaning forward in the hope of catching an answer.

  ‘Pierre, do you love your papa?’

  Under the ghastly candlelight, we saw the figure’s expression change, his eyes light up. A faint but fervent whisper: ‘Yes, oh yes.’

  The figure had barely lisped these words when Hartwell gave a pained sob.

  I should say this: for a moment, Price no longer looked the implacable exposer of frauds. Fighting to get his breath, he stared with spellbound, helpless fascination. His entire world was collapsing. After a moment, he found his voice and asked Hartwell, ‘Do you think Pierre might come to me?’

  Hartwell nodded. For a moment, nothing. We all held our breath.

  And then the figure began to move in an almost floating motion, behind Sidewinder, and towards Price. I tried to take in every sound and every movement but it was hard to focus in that room; my vision kept blurring, my mind drifting.

  What I remember next is Price, opposite me, angling himself to face the figure. Reaching out his hand to the figure’s shoulder. Hesitating . . .

  ‘Harry, are you sure?’ I whispered.

  Price was staring at his hand, which was just a few inches from the figure’s shoulder. His fingers were trembling. It wasn’t like him to allow nerves to get at him. Then he steeled himself.

  Almost having to force himself, he reached out a little further, and his fingertips connected with the figure’s shoulder.

  And then, a quiet gasp from Price as the horrible truth impacted.

  ‘Oh, so very cold,’ he muttered. ‘Dead cold.’

  And that scared me; because if this was a real child, I thought, a living child, Price of all people would know – wouldn’t he?

  He drew back his hand in a sort of dreamy astonishment, scrutinising the white viscous substance that was now sticky between his fingers.

  The figure was in my direct line of sight. It had dark, intelligent eyes, which gazed into Price’s without blinking. As the commander, Hartwell and I watched – stunned, and in Hartwell’s case, emotional – Price took up one of the small mirrors to illuminate the manifestation, and swept it up the length of the figure’s wasted arm.

  Now, except for the entranced Sidewinder, and Vernon, who was standing rigid with terror at the main door, we all looked at one another in mutual astonishment.

  Price whipped round. His grave expression seemed to ask me, Is this really happening? To which the only reasonable answer – for it was dictated by our own eyes – had to be yes. It was happening.

  The ethereal figure drew yet closer to Price’s side.

  ‘I – I have to know,’ he muttered, ‘how this can be. How . . .’

  His voice trailed off.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Sidewinder said drowsily. ‘I can no longer maintain the connection.’

  The small figure began inching away from us, back into the shadows.

  ‘Pierre, please don’t go,’ cried Hartwell. His voice was full of pleading agony.

  Price sprang from his chair and his arm shot out towards the figure. There was cry, a scuffle in the darkness as candles were knocked over and extinguished.

  For the quickest instant I thought I glimpsed Price grabbing the apparition’s arm.

  Suddenly, a flash!

  Everyone jerked at the pop of a bulb.

  And then the figure slipped free of Price’s grasp as easily as a seal in water.

  Sidewinder opened his eyes, as if awakening from a deep slumber, and looked groggily around the darkened room.

  ‘Where is he?’ Hartwell cried with impotent anguish. ‘Where did my boy go?’

  He sprang up and began searching in the intolerable darkness. As he did so, more candles were scattered and went out.

  ‘Wait, careful,’ Price shouted in the chaos. He was unsteady on his feet, his voice drowsy. ‘We need light. I need to see where he went! I need to search.’

  ‘What was the flash?’ Sidewinder muttered thickly. ‘Was that a camera flash?’

  We all looked in the direction of the flash, towards the door that led outside.

  I had expected to see Vernon standing there. What I hadn’t expected was his ringmaster’s smile, sly and triumphant as he lowered his camera.

  ‘I said no photographs!’ Sidewinder exclaimed. Holding onto the table, he rose unsteadily to his feet and made a convulsive gesture to claim the camera. ‘Hand it to me this instant!’

  Vernon looked at me for a moment, with a trace of self-consciousness, as though he was trying to convey a modicum of private apology.

  Then the young journalist turned and ran from the mill.

  – 24 –

  THE CONVERSION OF HARRY PRICE

  ‘Vernon – please, wait! Come back!’

  I stood in the doorway, scanning the atrocious darkness for the man I had trusted. I thought I saw the bobbing of a torch, but within seconds it had vanished.

  He would be lucky if he made it safely down the hill in this light, but Vernon was nothing if not daring. I knew he despised Price, but I hadn’t expected him to contravene Sidewinder’s ban on photographic equipment. An abject betrayal. And who knew what exactly he had managed to capture on film?

  ‘How the hell did he get the camera in without us seeing?’ Sidewinder demanded.

  I turned to the warden. ‘The camera was in his rucksack, of course.’

  ‘But he left that outside.’

  ‘Yes, but he could easily have retrieved it when we weren’t looking,’ I said. ‘The atmosphere was so disorientating I doubt any one of us would have noticed.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the commander said. He shook his head and came to the door. ‘Bloody hell, I need some air.’

  Hartwell remained sitting at the séance table. ‘Where did Pierre go?’ he asked. His eyes, bloodshot from crying, targeted Price, who was struggling to light the extinguished candles that lay scattered about the floor. ‘My boy, my poor boy. You bloody scoundrel, Price – you frightened him away!’

  Then I saw something I’d never seen before: Harry Price, shell-shocked. Stunned into silence. His hands were trembling as he straightened his coat, compo
sing himself. Here, miles from anywhere, gazing uncomprehendingly at the séance table, was a man who had dared to peer beyond the night and for once hadn’t liked what he had seen. He couldn’t control it and he couldn’t explain it. He looked pitiably lost, a man shipwrecked on the shores of his own doubt.

  I walked briskly over to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He blinked at me, as if it were he who had been in a trance. He reached for one of the mirrors. The reflected light flickered across his face – for a moment he was almost demonic.

  ‘How do you explain it?’ the commander said. ‘That can’t have just happened.’

  ‘It can and it did,’ Hartwell said, already sounding more confident. I looked for distress or terror in his face and failed to find it. There was only seething resentment. ‘And now I see that my poor wife was right. The dead – my own son – are reaching out to us to insist we reclaim what is ours. Our village. And we will take it back!’

  Framed in the doorway, the commander stared. ‘Now, don’t be so hasty.’

  Hartwell rose from his chair and kicked it over.

  ‘Mr Hartwell,’ the commander said abruptly, ‘everything you’ve seen and heard in here is classified, and you are not authorised to say anything about it.’

  ‘I don’t answer to you!’ Hartwell said, taking a step forward. ‘But I’ll make damned sure that you and the War Office and all your men answer to the living, and to the dead, for your crimes, Commander. Every one of you.’

  The commander stood there for a moment, his hands balled into fists. Then he stalked towards Hartwell, locking eyes with him. ‘You don’t know anything!’

  ‘What I know,’ Hartwell said darkly, ‘is what the dead have told us this night. You heard those noises from outside. You saw the message spelled out – we all did. The army’s hands are drenched in blood. You didn’t just evict the villagers of Imber, you abused those who refused to leave. The blacksmith? That man didn’t die of a broken heart, and he didn’t vanish. You murdered him.’

  The commander’s mouth fell open. I saw the doubt in his face, the consideration that Hartwell may have pulled a devious trick, and I also saw fear – fear that the spirit message had been real.

  And if it was . . .

  I felt a hot tear snake down my cheek.

  ‘Something you want to share with us, Sarah?’

  Hartwell’s question – delivered in a hard voice – startled me. I shook my head and wiped a hand over my cheek.

  ‘Bloody journalists,’ the commander said, glaring at Price, then me. ‘The two of you had better retrieve that photograph from him, like your lives depend on it.’

  I nodded. But I wasn’t just thinking about the photograph, or the incredible phenomenon we had just witnessed. I was thinking about the allegation of murder that had just been spelled out on the Ouija board – and my own father’s name.

  Harold Grey.

  *

  Before leaving the mill, I forced myself to complete the job at hand, and checked every possible exit. All of Price’s seals and controls were unscathed – unlike Price himself, whose hands were ice cold as I led him out of the mill and dragged the wooden door shut behind us.

  Sidewinder and Hartwell had a gone on a little further ahead with the commander. Much in need of reassurance, I kept my gaze on the white circles of light thrown by their handheld torches as they halted and waited for us at the belt of trees some twenty yards away.

  Price stood at the side of the filthy millpond, looking around uneasily, as if he half-expected the dead child to pounce at him from out of the darkness.

  ‘Harry?’

  Distantly, Price said, ‘“The sight of a spectral arm in an audience of three thousand persons will appeal more to hearts, make a deeper impression, and convert more people to a belief in the hereafter, in ten minutes, than a whole regiment of preachers, no matter how eloquent, could in five years.”’ He met my gaze. ‘Those were the words of P. B. Randall. Conan Doyle quotes him directly. The old dupe.’ He shook his head, as if appalled by the truth now evident. ‘Who would have thought he was right?’

  Standing there with his shoulders sagging, the once swaggering ghost hunter looked impossibly vulnerable. Stricken.

  ‘Then you’re convinced it was genuine?’ I asked.

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘It needs further investigation.’

  ‘You weren’t as close to the figure as I was,’ he said with the fervour of a man suffering a devastating epiphany. ‘I had not bargained for anything so striking as this. I touched him, Sarah; you saw I slowly passed my hand across his shoulder. Hartwell did also. He felt his respiratory movements. He felt his beating heart!’

  ‘Which would imply, surely, that the figure was a living boy. Not a ghost.’

  ‘I didn’t say I thought he was a ghost, as such, Sarah.’

  ‘Then you’re going to have to explain better, Harry, because at this moment I’m not following your logic.’

  He fell into a thoughtful silence, then glanced my way again.

  ‘You remember Velma, Sarah? She told us spiritual entities can interact with the physical world by enveloping themselves in ectoplasm.’

  ‘Harry—’

  ‘I dismissed ectoplasm as artificial matter produced by regurgitation with the help of the diaphragm.’

  I raised my voice. ‘And your experiments demonstrated you were right to do so!’

  He flung his arms wide. ‘But what if I was wrong? What if the form that appeared to us this night represents direct evidence of an afterlife and communication with those that have passed on?’

  Struck by his words, I reminded him that since the séance had terminated he had collected a sample of the viscous substance that had exuded from Sidewinder. Now he had the opportunity to study it.

  ‘Oh, I will study it, have no doubt.’

  ‘Until that analysis is complete, I think—’

  He gripped my wrist. ‘Did the figure look like a living person to you?’

  ‘Well, no, but—’

  ‘You saw, just now, its fluorescent outline, the way it shimmered. You saw it was induced to appear, as we were promised it would, as if from nowhere. You saw the ectoplasm issuing forth from Mr Sidewinder. If it was a living boy, how did he get inside the mill? How did he get out?’ He shook his head with self-reproach. ‘What if I was too sure of myself, Sarah? What if this boy is the closest thing to proof of the spiritual realm I have ever encountered?’

  It was a possibility, granted. But believing it so readily was out of character, especially for a man normally so critical and exacting.

  I began to worry if there was something else, something I didn’t yet understand, influencing his judgement.

  Perhaps sensing my doubt, Price let go of my wrist. Then he shook his head and said something that told me there were changes coming for both of us. Changes and trouble.

  ‘I am, more than ever, convinced that I was wrong to be so doubtful, so dismissive,’ he said, looking hopelessly at me with swimming eyes. Price, who was normally so strong, so resolute, now looked anything but. ‘All these years, I was mistaken. Sarah, whatever will I do now?’

  *

  Two hours had passed and we were back at Westdown Camp. I was in Hut Three, lying on my bed, trying to sleep, when a hurried knocking got me up and padding across to the door.

  ‘Are you awake?’ From the other side of the door came Price’s voice. ‘Pack your things. We’re leaving.’

  What?

  Ten minutes later, I was dressed and outside. The moon was high, a silver disc turning the curved steel huts and barracks into ghostly, shimmering shapes. I arrived outside Central Security Control to see Price emerging from the building. He strode stiffly to his Rolls-Royce.

  ‘Where’s your case, Sarah?’

  He was already climbing into the driver’s seat, an
d the determination on his face told me what he was planning: get back to the laboratory, analyse the sample of ectoplasm, write to his followers announcing his encounter with the undead to the world.

  Of course, he’d have to change names and locations, but the story would be out there. And I could empathise a little with his zealousness. Imber had given him the biggest story of his life; an unexpected and unsettling investigation that had shown him just how wrong he had always been. But to an egotist like Harry Price, being wrong also meant something else: his reputation had to be protected, and at any cost.

  ‘I said to pack! No time to lose.’

  ‘But I’m not ready to leave,’ I told him.

  He gave me a look of frustration tempered with incredulity, and all my old resentment about his dominating attitude surged up. I was determined not to let him bully me.

  ‘Our work here isn’t done,’ I said, picturing Father’s face. My work isn’t done.

  Vernon’s voice came into my head then: I have a bad feeling I can’t shake. A sense that there’s something deeper out in that village. Something darker.

  I wanted to ignore Vernon’s voice. It was pushing me onto a path I had no wish to walk, towards the mystery of a blacksmith murdered here eighteen years ago.

  Murdered by a man with my father’s name.

  I shook my head and took a step away from Price’s saloon.

  ‘But, Sarah – I’m relying on you to get that photograph back!’

  ‘Vernon has his own agenda,’ I said, feeling disappointed and worried. ‘I’ve no idea where he’s gone or what he’s planning.’ And then there was Hartwell’s agenda. No doubt he would get to work bringing together an assortment of former citizens to fight for the Imber cause. ‘You shouldn’t rush to put out this story, Harry, not until—’

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ he exclaimed, banging his hands on the wheel. ‘Are you denying what we saw out there? You think it was a hoax?’

  I didn’t know. I had replayed the mill séance in my mind over and over, both the preparations we had made and the moment when Price had scuffled in the dark with the small figure, and I was at a complete loss to explain how it could have been a hoax. The door was locked, every window and door sealed with wires that had remained perfectly intact. What’s more, Hartwell had confirmed the child was indeed Pierre. Which meant either he was mistaken – which seemed very hard to believe – or that Pierre was still alive. But I had seen the boy’s grave.