by Will Maclean
He sniggered. ‘Lighten up, Comprehensive. I’m here for the duration, not because I really want to be, but because it’s an easy vacation. Besides which, Jules wants to be here. She’s into all this stuff.’
‘Really?’ I remembered her visible disquiet at the violent rapping on the table at the end of last week’s séance. ‘She didn’t seem to be, last time I was here.’
‘Ah, she recovers quickly. And trust me, her curiosity about all this outweighs her fear. In the meantime, I’m quite happy to go along with any old mumbo-jumbo. At least, until I run out of fags.’
‘Or booze.’
‘Ah, there is no booze, believe me. I checked every-bloody-where.’
I let a couple of seconds pass before playing my ace.
‘I have booze.’
‘You? No!’
‘Bottle of whisky in my bag.’
‘You are my new best friend, Comprehensive. What’s your name again?’
I laughed. ‘You genuinely can’t remember?’
Seb shrugged shamelessly, as if to say, Why on earth would I have done?
‘Tim. It’s Tim.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Tim!’ He shook my hand and granted me the first genuine smile I had ever seen him attempt. ‘Let’s endure another afternoon of this, then get into that whisky.’
Access to my room was via a single grand staircase of ancient black wood, roughly at the centre of the house. Graham led the way, carrying a small leather folder, as I followed with my rucksack.
The upper floor consisted of one long gallery-style hallway, of the same black wood, with a long-faded carpet of pale puce running its full length. Heavy doors of dark brown oak led into what were presumably bedrooms. On the vast landing, a colossal piece of furniture, somewhere between a Welsh dresser and a sideboard, held numerous pieces of dusty Pekin ware.
Graham stood as if looking at all this for the first time. ‘The bedrooms run all through the upper floor. At this end of the corridor are a couple of spare rooms, and, well, long story short, you’re in one of those, I’m afraid. But fear not – we’ve scraped together what we can, and, whilst not up to the standards of the other rooms, I think you’ll find it pretty comfy!’ As we advanced down the hallway, the corridor grew steadily colder. It was a warm day outside, I thought. God only knew what this extremity of the house would be like during winter.
‘Here we are!’ said Graham, opening a door. The room beyond was dark, even with the curtains of the casement window pulled open. The woodchip wallpaper was painted a sad cornflower blue, the kind of surface that would always be cold and clammy to the touch. There was a large, boxy wardrobe with an oval mirror set in the front, and a small writing desk with a dining-room chair, the latter upholstered in dark green velvet. There was no other furniture, apart from the single bed, an antique thing with a brass frame. I sat down on the bed, stunned by how hard the mattress was.
‘I know it’s not ideal, Tim.’ Graham pulled the chair out from under the desk and sat on it the wrong way round, his corduroy-clad arms folded across the back. ‘But I’m afraid it’s the best we can do.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s fine.’ I was trying not to be deferential, not to appear desperately grateful for the chance to participate in all of this. I thought again of Abi, and how much she would have enjoyed herself here. I imagined her here now, castigating Graham for his lack of method and rigour.
‘Won’t it, Tim?’ said Graham. I realised he’d been talking to me.
‘Of course!’ I said. I had no idea what Graham had just said.
‘So, if that’s OK, I’ll talk you through what we’re doing here.’
‘You’re looking for a ghost.’
‘Yes, Tim. And, in a very crucial sense, no.’ He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a knuckle. ‘We are attempting several things. The first is to establish whether a ghost – whatever that may be – is present in this house. Now, I’m pretty confident there is a genuine haunting in this house, and that whatever entity dwells in Yarlings wishes to make contact. We’ve seen evidence of that last time you were here, and there’s also the recording we made.’
‘Can I hear the recording?’
‘Later, sure. Our second objective is to communicate with that entity, via sittings and séances with a planchette, Ouija board or similar. Now, as we discussed, séances and the like are in no way scientific, but if I’m right, that won’t matter. All that matters is that we provide a conduit that our ghost – if he really is Tobias Salt – will recognise as an interface. Are you familiar with that word, Tim? It’s from computers.’
‘Yes.’ I wasn’t.
‘Right. And so, our aim here is to lure our ghost into a place where it can be measured by the instruments of modern science. As well as the tape recorder, and the electromagnetic field detector, I’ve set up a voltmeter, and a self-registering thermograph. Oh, and before I forget’ – Graham unzipped his leather folder and handed me a couple of sheets of Xeroxed paper – ‘please be so good as to familiarise yourself with this.’
I glanced at the first page:
THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOBIAS SALT (1601–1662)
‘Everything we know about the villain who lived here,’ said Graham. ‘It’s vital you read that document before tomorrow, so you’re at the same level as everyone else.’
‘The same level?’
‘Yes. I think much of what we’re doing here is about the interaction of consciousness with place and circumstance. It’s just a theory, but I’d prefer it if you knew as much about Tobias Salt as everyone else. It also means you won’t be asking him stuff we already know.’
‘Great,’ I said, flipping the pages.
‘That’s it for the moment,’ said Graham. ‘Apart from some general house rules, which we can go through later.’ Awkwardly, he disentangled his long legs from the chair. ‘In the meantime, just settle in, get to know the place. It might be helpful if you walk around, register the emotional “tone”, as it were. Dinner is six p.m. sharp.’
He lingered for a second – gangly, awkward, yet somehow still supercilious – before ducking out through the low doorway and into the hall.
26
After unpacking my few belongings, I lay on the lumpy mattress and read the pages that Graham had given me.
THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOBIAS SALT (1601–1662)
The first page was taken up by a portrait of a man in a black jerkin with white lace collars, long, lank hair and a pinched, thin face. His stare, even in a black-and-white copy, burned with a furious intensity, as if he were constantly angry. The rest of the pages were text.
Unlike the infamous Matthew Hopkins, whom history remembers as the most feared of the so-called ‘witch finders’ of Puritan England, Tobias Salt sought neither recognition nor reputation. Indeed, it was for very good reasons, inexplicably tied up with the story and eventual fate of this morally reprehensible, though undoubtedly complex, man, that Salt worked to keep his deeds under a cloak of obscurity.
A competent captain in the ranks of Cromwell’s parliamentarians, Tobias Salt received Yarlings Hall as a gift for his military service in 1651. Salt’s life might have meandered along the typical course of men of his era, standing and age, were it not for an incident that altered the trajectory of his existence for good. On 12 December 1652, his teenage son, Abraham, was thrown from his horse, struck his head on a stone drinking-trough and died immediately. The effect of this tragedy on Salt was immediate and profound, and The Historie of the Noble Familys of East Anglia (Gadsby, 1700) describes Salt as catatonic with grief for a long time afterwards – ‘insensitive to the sighte of his beloved wyfe and daughters … unmovinge, as a man deprived of his wittes’.
When Salt did eventually recover, the scant sources available tell us that his demeanour– previously that of a man of mediocre intelligence and ambition – had changed entirely. Indeed, Salt seems to have spent the following year reading as much as possible, and it is during this period that we can safely assert he b
ecame exposed to the subjects that would grow to obsess him – the occult, black magic, and the survival of the human being after death. Salt believed he could, under the correct conditions, journey to the ‘immortal realms’ and somehow recover his son. This belief shaped much of the madness and evil that was to colour the last ten years of his life.
There were four pages of this, written in a style that seemed to get denser as it went on. Salt appointed himself local witch-finder, a duty he performed with fanatical zeal, condemning twenty-nine women and seven men to death. This was the perfect cover for a man who by that point was a fully-fledged warlock, and head of a secret coven of seven witches, men and women, called The Knot. Entry to The Knot was granted only to those who were ‘highe adepts’, and even then, they had to pass an initiation rite, which involved ‘perswading a pious man out of his faithe’. Salt apparently controlled the sect through magical means, by carving wooden ‘mommets’ of the members, then threatening them with physical pain by means of violence to the effigies. With his acolytes, Salt sought to perform an ancient ritual involving sacrifice to ‘overcome death’s dominion’, effectively making himself immortal. Preparations for this ritual began with the slaughter of sheep and cows. After this, a string of local children went missing.
At the same time, Salt terrorised the local countryside with fanatical fervour. Judicial hangings and drownings became commonplace. At some point, suspicions about the missing children began to centre on Salt himself, and anger amongst the locals reached boiling point.
Salt became convinced his ritual would only work if his wife and two daughters – at this point, prisoners in their own home – were sacrificed. During the ritual, the north wing burned down, killing Salt and, presumably, the other members of The Knot as well. The cause of the fire was never satisfactorily established, with various local legends telling of either an angry mob burning the wing down, or the ritual itself summoning an infernal force that couldn’t be contained. Either way, the bodies of Salt’s wife and daughters were recovered, with their hearts removed, as were the bodies of Salt’s followers.
Salt’s body was never found.
The symbol of The Knot was three small triangles connected by a larger circle, and it was inscribed in the wooden lintel of the fireplace in the Great Hall. Since then, the house had apparently had a long history of haunting, with some of the residents moving out because of ghostly activity.
I finished reading and lay back, my head on the cold pillow, and thought. A coven of seven. Weren’t we seven, now, in this house? And making oneself immortal, defeating death – was there really a ritual for that? And, most pressingly of all, how had the story of Tobias Salt – although extreme, hardly uncommon in a place like England – never reached my attention before?
I re-read this fantastic, perfect story, until the words came loose from the page and I drifted off into a deep, satisfying sleep, as if I were finally home.
I was awoken by a persistent rapping on the woodwork that grew louder and more insistent.
I almost fell over getting off the bed, steadied myself, then opened the door. It was Juliet. She flashed a brief, friendly smile.
‘Hello, Tim. Welcome to the asylum!’
‘Thank you.’
‘I come with a proposal. Seb says you have whisky, and whilst we don’t have any alcohol, we do have three bottles of soda water, so we at least don’t have to drink raw whisky like roustabouts on an oil rig.’
‘Great!’
‘Who knows? I may even be able to rustle up some ice. And – is it OK if I bring Neil? Seb can’t bear him, but I worry he’s lonely here. We’re the only people he knows.’
‘Sure. Bring Polly if you like. And … Sally?’
Juliet made a face at both of these suggestions. ‘Let’s just keep it among ourselves for the time being, hmm?’
‘Fine.’
‘Oh, and would you mind coming to our room? Your room’s just a bit …’ she peered at the gloomy blue walls, the wardrobe, the complete lack of personal effects ‘… bleak?’
‘Of course.’
‘Great! Come and give us a knock after dinner. Our room’s three doors down from yours.’
A little later, I headed back downstairs. The sunshine was mellowing into bronze, the end of a perfect summer’s day in the English countryside. Already, the number of dark corners inside the house seemed to have multiplied, and I remembered with a jolt that I would be staying here for the next two weeks. What was the house like at night?
No one else seemed to be about, although I could hear a radio playing upstairs. I looked into the Great Hall, where the windows framed the sunlit woods just beyond the small, unkempt rear lawn. It was empty.
I wandered out again and into the Victorian extension built long after fate decided, one way or another, to scour Tobias Salt from the earth with fire. I realised I was forcing myself to feel something, to experience the weight and significance of the house’s dark history, and stopped. I found my way to Graham’s office and knocked on the door.
‘Who is it?’ said Graham imperiously.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Tim.’ I turned the handle and pushed, but the door wouldn’t budge. ‘It’s locked!’
‘Yes,’ said Graham, through the door.
‘Why?’
Graham embarked on some kind of explanation, but the door was thick, and his voice just sounded like so much bassoon practice.
‘I can’t hear you,’ I shouted, with more exasperation in my voice than I intended.
Graham mumbled something and I heard a chair scrape across the floor, followed by the clatter of a key in the lock. The door opened about a foot, but Graham stood in the gap, struggling both to fill as much of the aperture as possible, and to make this absurd posture look natural.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if I could hear the Raudive voice?’
‘Ah! Of course. Could you give me a couple of minutes? You can wait in the Great Hall. I’d invite you in, but for the purpose of this experiment, it’s vital all data is not made available to participants until the end. We don’t want to prejudice the results.’
‘How would I prejudice the results?’
Graham smiled infuriatingly. ‘It would prejudice the results if I told you.’
I wandered back to the Great Hall. Something occurred to me, and I wandered over to the fireplace, where I scanned the great wooden lintel.
And there it was: cut or possibly burned into the wood. Three triangles, pointing downwards, connected by a large circle, with a notch at the bottom. The symbol of The Knot.
I ran my fingertip along the groove of the design: up, down and around, and wondered.
Ten minutes later, I was engrossed in Our Haunted Kingdom.
I was re-reading the entry detailing the haunting at 16 Montpelier Road, Ealing, which, no matter how many times I read it, made me feel as if it were a riddle I couldn’t decipher. Amongst the usual drama of a haunted house is Green’s testimony of his own visit to the property, where, on the roof – a notorious suicide spot – he found himself possessed by the urge to simply walk off the edge into the garden, despite knowing that it was three storeys below. His father, accompanying him, just managed to intervene in time to prevent Green stepping off the roof to his death. I found this tale supremely unsettling, much more so than other, more lurid accounts of hauntings. Who put the idea into Green’s head? How did they do it? And, most terrifyingly of all, why did they do it? Why would this force, whatever it was, want a man to walk to his death? These questions were untameably strange, and again I discovered the thrill of encountering the genuinely, malevolently inexplicable that reading them always gave me.
I looked up to see Graham standing over me.
‘Shall we?’ he said.
I followed Graham through the main hallway to the older part of the house, the south wing. We ducked into the blue room where our previous séance had taken place. It was in darkness, the curtains drawn. Graham flicked the li
ght on.
There was the table, and the seven chairs, and the wooden sideboard. On the sideboard sat the tape recorder, as well as the electromagnetic field detector. Next to that was another piece of equipment, which I took to be the self-registering thermograph, alongside a regular thermometer, and a voltmeter. Dials held needles waiting to flicker at any fluctuation of elemental forces, indicator lights waited to glow: all of this was enormously pleasing and exciting to me. Taped to one wall was the same picture of Tobias Salt Graham had given me – a furious-looking man with burning eyes, staring out of history with unbridled disgust. Next to that was another portrait of Salt, executed in oils, and I recognised it as Sally’s handiwork. It was the kind of painting that an art teacher would politely describe as ‘enthusiastic’. Salt’s arms were raised, and above him, between his outstretched fingertips, the moon glowed. Next to these were taped various other images Xeroxed from books – an engraving of the house when it was new and whole, a woodcut of a witch trial, and a sad-eyed woman in seventeenth-century clothing, with two equally sad-faced young girls.
‘Salt’s wife, Anne, and his daughters, Agnes and Jane,’ said Graham. ‘From what we can gather, his control of them was absolute.’
‘Right until the moment he killed them.’
Graham’s teeth shone white through his beard in a patronising smile. ‘Well, I’m glad you read the document, Tim. Yes. It’s my guess their deaths were a statement of intent. A sign to whatever forces his crazed mind believed it was contacting, that he was utterly committed to his occult aims.’ With his thumb, he packed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. ‘And who’s to say he didn’t succeed?’
I looked at Graham. He arched his eyebrows cryptically as he lit his pipe. Slate-coloured smoke drifted slowly between us, past the mirrors above the fireplace, tangling and untangling in the air like the stuff of thought itself.
‘You’re saying he might be haunting this place because he succeeded? In his immortality ritual?’