(2011) What Lies Beneath

by Sarah Rayne

  I’m finding it more and more difficult to breathe, and my lungs feel as if they’re on fire. Moments earlier I heard dreadful formless screams and my heart leaped with hope because I thought someone was at hand – someone who would rescue me. But then I understood that of course it’s my own screams I’m hearing.

  It’s mid-afternoon – the ticking clock tells me that – and I think my mind is becoming affected, because a little while ago I thought I heard voices outside, as if someone might have come into the manor grounds and gone across the kitchen garden. I tried to get to the window to see, but I can no longer stand upright. But even if entire armies marched across the old gardens I couldn’t call out to them.

  Three days ago I found the old wind-up gramophone in the back of a cupboard. It’s one I bought in the 1920s, and put away when I got a better, electricity-driven one. But after the power failed I was glad of something to drive back the silence.

  I’m trying to do that now. I’ve played several pieces, but today I’ve played the music that always meant so much to me, The Deserted Village. If ever there was a prophetic piece of music, it’s that. It’s the music I shall hear as I die.

  I believe I’ll die soon now – I hope so. The pain is becoming worse now, and I can barely breathe.

  I wonder if these pages will ever be found. I hope so. I’d like those people of the future to know my story.

  The Present

  The young man from the forensics department investigating the Cadence Manor bodies passed the autopsy to his inspector.

  ‘Cause of death for both bodies,’ he said. ‘The Cadence Manor chap had a broken neck. I’d say a straightforward fall from the upper floor.’

  ‘Ah. Well, that’s as we thought. And the one we found inside the lodge?’

  ‘A bit more complicated, sir. As you know, it was found seated at the desk in that upstairs room. We haven’t found conclusive proof, but there’re indications of chemical burns on the surface of some of the bones.’

  ‘That stuff they dropped on the village in the 1950s?’

  ‘That’s the conclusion. It’s our guess he was some sort of recluse and had no idea what was happening outside. If he was trapped in that room—’

  ‘Yes, I see. It’s a pity,’ said the inspector, ‘that those papers in the desk were so badly affected by the Geranos.’

  ‘We got the first sentence, sir. But it doesn’t tell us anything.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘ “The time has come when I will have to do something.” That was all that was legible.’

  ‘What a pity,’ said the inspector. ‘It would have been interesting to know who that man was.’

  Author’s Note

  England has many ‘lost’ villages – remote pockets that once were thriving communities, but that, for widely different reasons, now lie dead and silent, as if preserved beneath dusty amber glazes.

  In the main, they were lost to the laws of enclosure, to coastal erosion or monastic depopulation. But there are also plague villages, wiped out by the Black Death, villages – sometimes entire towns – drowned by the creation of reservoirs, rural communities and hamlets abandoned for no known or discoverable reason. Sadly, the histories and even the names of many of these have been lost, and all that remain are earthworks and perhaps a lonely church.

  But there are also places that have been the subject of strange, even macabre, experiments. Gruinard Island – the ‘anthrax isle’ in the Scottish Highlands – sealed off from the world for almost half a century. Places such as Porton Down and Sellafield whos sometimes-contentious, occasionally-mysterious, research has become uneasily etched onto the fabric of England’s lore.

  Priors Bramley is fictional. But its counterpart can be found in more than one village in England.