The Ghost Hunters

by Neil Spring

  I was amazed. The Harry I knew would never have created such a document, a tool capable of furnishing investigators other than himself with so much information, and I quickly said so to Glanville.

  ‘Nevertheless, Miss Grey, Harry advised us to examine all the passages and walls for pencil markings or writing, and to ring any we found with chalk; and we were encouraged to work in pairs so that one could rest while the other kept watch. Groups of three were discouraged.’

  ‘Now, that doesn’t surprise me,’ I said, remembering my first visit to the Rectory and Vernon Wall’s presence on that occasion. ‘What else?’

  Anything we did see we duly recorded and sent on to Price at his London office.’

  He told me then of the phenomena witnessed, and as he spoke I felt a chill creep across the flesh of my bare arms.

  ‘The house was full of sounds, especially during the night – thuds, scrapings, tapping and knocks. They came sometimes from far away, sometimes within a few feet of us. We were able to account for some: vermin, dripping taps, and so on.’

  ‘Some?’

  ‘But by no means all. On one occasion my son was alone in the library when he distinctly heard light tripping footsteps descending the stairs. And then they stopped. On another occasion one of our most active observers, a gentleman named Mark Kerr-Pearse, was showing some interested visitors – three women – around the Rectory. At first nothing happened. But then, as they were crossing the landing and making to descend the main staircase, immediately outside the Blue Room one of the ladies came to a complete standstill. She was trembling all over, couldn’t move, as if paralysed. She said that her hands were freezing with pins and needles all over them.’

  I knew instantly the place on the landing of which he spoke. Glanville was watching my reaction carefully. ‘Now, I see I have your attention. But there were other things I must tell you about.

  ‘We knew, of course, that objects were said to move from one room to the other, especially during the residence of the Foysters, so we placed items at various points throughout the house – mantelpieces, shelves and so on – and ringed them with chalk so that we could see whether they moved. Well, I can tell you, that they did move, and frequently. And we found objects as well – objects that appeared out of nowhere.’

  The words jolted me as the shadowy figure from my dreams flashed into my mind. I heard Marianne’s voice speaking to me across the years: The Dark Woman will return.

  ‘What did you say?’ I whispered.

  ‘Sarah, what’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet.’

  She is coming for you, Sarah.

  ‘Tell me again what you said,’ I repeated urgently.

  ‘Objects,’ he repeated slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘We found objects, occasionally, around the house. No one could account for them. Harry had a name for them. He called them—’

  ‘Apports,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, apports. You’re familiar with the term, I see.’

  ‘Very familiar,’ I replied, remembering the St Ignatius medallion we had discovered in the Blue Room. ‘You must tell me what you found.’

  ‘Many things: pebbles, mothballs, a dictionary,’ he said. ‘A French dictionary, to be exact. And a small gold ring. We gave it to a psychic to examine – Lieutenant Aitchison, who has shown some promise in experiments conducted at Price’s Laboratory. The moment he held it in his hands he dropped it and shouted, “Murder.” He refused to hold it again.’ Glanville paused, observing my reaction. ‘Miss Grey, are you all right?’

  ‘Tell me quickly,’ I said, my head reeling, ‘where exactly in the Rectory did you find this ring? And the dictionary?’

  ‘Miss Grey, what is the matter?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the landing upstairs, just outside the Blue Room.’

  It was the same place.

  I drew in a breath and said, ‘Mr Glanville, that is the same position where, ten years ago, the Reverend Smith reported hearing voices and whisperings. It’s the same place where Marianne Foyster later reported being struck in the face, where she found a French dictionary and a wedding ring. The scribbling on the wall – “mass, light, prayers” – appeared right at that spot. And it’s the same area where scores of witnesses have reported the sensation of coldness. You just said so yourself!’

  ‘Yes, I know, but—’

  ‘Dr Chipp!’ I explained. ‘He said in his original letter, all those years ago, that when he was at the Rectory, he lost a French dictionary.’ I was struggling to get the words out. ‘I must go and see him and ask him about this.’

  It seemed like a sensible suggestion. So why was Glanville now shaking his head?

  ‘Dr Chipp is dead, Miss Grey.’

  I shivered. The old man’s warning rushed back to confront me: Our sins will engulf us both.

  I felt suddenly so small, so intimidated, I might have been sitting at St Mary’s School for Girls, cowering under Sister Regis’s punishing gaze.

  ‘Shortly before he died, Dr Chipp wrote to Harry explain -ing that you had been to see him,’ said Glanville, and with something close to horror I realised it wasn’t just concern I saw in his face, but pity. ‘My dear, Dr Chipp said that you were frightened. Tell me why.’

  I knew the only way to help Glanville understand was to tell him my own secrets, and that was unthinkable. But what was the alternative? To allow suffering to creep steadily in? To end up like Dr Chipp, Ethel Bull and the others?

  I shook my head, recovering my concentration with a question that seemed obvious. ‘Is there a floor plan of the Rectory?’

  ‘Yes, I drew one myself.’ Glanville took the book, flicking through its pages. ‘Here it is.’

  The diagram he presented clearly showed the layout of the cellar, the ground floor, the first floor and the attic. I studied it for a moment and then carefully tore the page in two down the middle.

  ‘Wait!’ Glanville cried. ‘What are you doing?’ But it was too late. All he could do was watch as I carefully overlaid the two parts of the diagram.

  The pieces of the complex jigsaw puzzle slotted together.

  ‘Miss Grey, what is it?’

  ‘I’m beginning to understand,’ I said slowly. ‘I think I know what all this means, what we have to do.’

  And then I was on my feet, flying towards the door.

  ‘Wait! Where are you going?’

  ‘To Borley,’ I said without looking back. ‘To end all of this.’

  * * *

  Notes

  1 The word ‘planchette’ is derived from the French for ‘little plank’, and is a small piece of flat wood – usually heart-shaped – which moves about on a board to spell out messages or answer questions, allegedly under the influence of paranormal voices. Table-tipping is, similarly, another type of seance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it and wait for the table to move, or tip, in response to questions. Answers are spelled out according to letters of the alphabet called out over the table.

  2 ‘Instruction Booklets for Observers at Borley Rectory’.

  – 30 –

  A PROPHECY FULFILLED

  ‘Sit down, Sarah!’

  The voice pulled me back into the past. I stood rooted to the spot on the threshold of my office, one foot in the corridor outside, facing into the thick darkness. I could smell the familiar scent of fresh pipe tobacco air, could feel my hands and legs beginning to go numb.

  ‘I know it’s you,’ I whispered.

  And Harry Price was before me once again, stepping out of the darkness.

  I uttered a sharp gasp, tottered unsteadily back into the room and collapsed into my chair.

  He looked down at me uncertainly, like a child coming to apologise. ‘Hello again, Sarah.’

  Sidney Glanville became concerned. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Grey; I was going to tell you he was here. I wanted to explain first—’

  But I had turned my head away from both of them and was st
aring at my reflection in the window. My heart was hammering as I wondered what I would say to Price and how I would say it without losing my composure. But it was Price who spoke next, not to me but to Glanville, whom he asked to leave the room.

  When he had gone I turned my head warily towards Price. He looked so much older, with heavy circles under his eyes. His teeth were even yellower than I remembered, his skin white as paper. Even his eyes, once so brilliantly blue, seemed to have lost their radiance. He saw me looking at him and said, ‘The years haven’t been good to me, have they?’

  ‘They have been harder to me, Harry. Since we last met I’ve measured the full distance between happiness and despair.’ Just seeing him again reminded why I had needed to leave him. ‘What made you think you could drag me along for all that time as an addendum to your life?’ His eyes grew wide with sorrow. Real sorrow this time. ‘That you could make changes at the Laboratory, plan for its future, without involving me? Allow someone – a stranger – to hurt Mother and me, to indulge his deceptions just to punish your enemies? How did that make you feel, Harry? Well,’ I nodded at him, raising my voice, ‘it wasn’t just them you punished, was it?’

  He coughed hoarsely. ‘Sarah,’ he said softly, ‘I am truly sorry for what I did to you and your mother. I never intended to harm either of you.’

  A quick memory of Mother’s pained expression after the Schneider seance. As my nightmares had worsened, she had become a shadow of her former self. I hardly saw her any more. She was always in her bedroom and never allowed me inside. ‘The pain you caused us both, the false hope you allowed us to entertain – you can’t take that back.’

  He kept his eyes lowered and said only, ‘You know how I can be.’

  ‘No, that’s not good enough,’ I said, raising my voice against him. But I was furious with myself too, for the fact that I was still there talking to him. Walking away wouldn’t have been easy. His magnetism held me, threatened to draw from within me questions about his life: whether he was happy and fulfilled, whether he had missed me as I had missed him. My heart and head did battle. How could I ask him any of these questions? My dignity was too dearly bought to be suddenly handed back to him on a plate.

  ‘Don’t you ever stop to ask yourself whether it’s worth it – the quest you’re on? Whether it’s worth the pain and suffering?’

  ‘Yes, every day. It’s exhausting.’

  ‘I don’t mean your suffering!’ I cried, exasperated. ‘I mean the people you leave behind, the ones whose lives you blow through like a hurricane.’

  ‘You’re no different from me, Sarah. We are the same.’

  ‘We’re not the same.’

  He nodded, detecting the tremor in my voice. ‘Perhaps not always, but now – yes, we are the same. You want the truth just as badly as me, for your own reasons.’ He left a weighty pause. Then, ‘I wonder if you’re willing to tell me what they are.’

  His eyes cut into me. I faltered, looked away.

  ‘No. I didn’t think so.’ He stepped forward and I flinched as he touched my arm. ‘Sarah, come back with me, please. I need you.’

  As he spoke, Velma Crawshaw’s haunted face floated into my consciousness. I remembered what he had done to her and a voice in my head said, ‘Nothing good will come of this. Walk away, now.’

  I followed that voice as far as the door to my office. Until something – perhaps my determination to correct whatever was happening – made me shut it out.

  I turned. ‘Why are you here, Harry?’

  He looked thoughtfully at the book that lay open on my desk. ‘If you had asked me what I thought about the Borley case ten years ago, I would have said it was one hundred per cent bunkum. But now I think it is only ninety-seven per cent bunkum.’

  ‘Tell me why,’ I insisted.

  ‘There have been developments, huge advancements, since you have been away, Sarah; notably the appearance of apports, written messages obtained through seances and a most alarming prophecy.’

  ‘What sort of prophecy?’ I asked with some apprehension, for the word made me think of Marianne Foyster’s warning to me years before.

  ‘After a few visits to the Rectory, Glanville remembered an old planchette and rescued it from a lumber room at home where it was stored. He took it to the Rectory and used it first late one night in the library with the help of his daughter. No sooner did their fingers come into contact with it than it started to write in large and well-formed letters. It ultimately produced words, dates, phrases, even drawings. Some of it was gibberish, some plainly untrue, some unverifiable; but Sarah, a certain amount was true and has been confirmed.

  I held my breath.

  ‘On March 27th, 1938 we received the most remarkable message of all – a prophecy which tells of the one thing that is unimaginable to anyone wishing to study the mystery of the Rectory any further,’ said Price. ‘It foretells its destruction.’ He picked up the book and flicked through its pages and then handed it back to me. ‘Here, see for yourself.’

  This is what I read:

  Does anyone want to speak with us? Yes.

  Who are you? Sunex Amures and one of the men mean to burn down the Rectory tonight at nine o’clock end of the haunting go to the Rectory and you will be able to see us enter into our own and under the ruins you will find bones of murdered … under the ruins means you to have proof of haunting of the Rectory at Borley the understanding of which game tells the story of the murder which happened there.

  In which room will the fire start? Over the hall. Yes, yes you must go if you want proof. 1

  We were sitting beside one another now, at my desk, surrounded by piles of unsolicited film scripts – the sort that are poorly bound and arrive in scruffy envelopes. The book before us was more interesting than any of these. I stared, puzzled by the text. ‘This appears to foretell that the Rectory will burn …’ I trailed off. The rest suggested that under the ruins would be found the bones of a murdered person – the nun perhaps? The idea would certainly corroborate Marianne Foyster’s suspicion that the nun’s remains were buried somewhere in the Rectory grounds. But still, the message made little sense. ‘It’s almost a year old.’

  Observing my confusion, Price nodded and said quickly, ‘Precisely!’ Then he raised his eyebrows in question. ‘So?’

  ‘So … what?’ I demanded.

  ‘So, surely now you agree I am duty bound to reconsider the matter? In light of what has happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What has happened?’

  His mouth fell open with an expression of incredulity. ‘You mean you haven’t heard? You don’t know?’

  ‘Know what, Harry?’

  ‘Sarah …’ He turned a further few pages of the book until he came to a black-and-white image of the Rectory. ‘This photograph was taken just last week.’

  I felt the shudder of my own alarm.

  ‘You understand now?’ he whispered. ‘The prophecy has already been fulfilled. Borley Rectory burned down two weeks ago. The fire started over the hall, at exactly the place this entity, “Sunex Amures”, had foretold and at the time prophesied.’

  The Dark Woman will return.

  Through short breaths I asked Price whether anyone was harmed.

  ‘Thankfully, no,’ he replied. ‘The Rectory was empty when it happened. And yet …’ His eyes misted over and I imagined him standing on the lawn of the Rectory looking up at the flames that licked its turrets and leapt from its windows.

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘The locals who watched it burn swore they saw rushing figures amid the smoke and flames.’

  * * *

  Note

  1 ‘The Haunting of Borley Rectory. Private and Confidential Report’.

  – 31 –

  REVELATIONS

  ‘Now then,’ said Price as he laid his hand on my arm, ‘you said just a moment ago, before Sidney left us, that you had something important to tell me, something about the case. What was it?’

  The mu
scles in my shoulders tensed as an image of Marianne Foyster’s troubled face watching me from the recesses of the main hall at Borley Rectory came into my mind and I thought of her sinister warning: After the losses you will suffer, after the fire, after the proof that will be found – the Dark Woman will return.

  ‘Her,’ I said at last. ‘It’s all about her, Harry. The Dark Woman. The nun. Who she is, what happened to her.’

  It was clear to me now that Marianne Foyster was right: beneath the veneer of fantastical events at that place lurked a quiet human agony crying out for release. The force of it was bitter and malevolent; and if Marianne was right, if the spirit of the nun brought a curse, an execration, upon those who deceived others, then I would need my sharpest faculties about me.

  ‘What more do we know of her?’ I asked.

  ‘The legend of the nun is the most compelling aspect of the case,’ said Price, ‘and you’ll be relieved to hear that I am quickly coming to the opinion that it is more than a legend. We have now uncovered many more witnesses to her haunting. By our estimation, she has been seen by no fewer than twenty people in the last fifty years. Twenty, Sarah! Most of those people are either gravely unhappy, unwell or now dead. The weight of the evidence convinced Glanville to look into the matter. His family arranged an experiment, an attempt to communicate with her spirit.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Using the old planchette he retrieved from the attic of his home, Sidney and his family conducted a seance in the library of the Rectory. On this occasion, as you can see here’ – he pointed to the book – ‘words, dates, drawings and phrases spelt out meant nothing to any of the individuals at the time. But among all of this there was, I am amazed to say, a message.’ He turned another page. ‘A message that purportedly came from the spirit of the dead nun herself.’