The Secret of Crickley Hall (66 page)

The engineer picked up his daughter and bit into his lower lip at the stab of pain in his shoulder. Loren wrapped her thin legs round his waist and he carried her to the stairs; he began to climb them with weary effort, glad to be leaving the dank and dingy basement.

With one last lingering look towards the black portal to the boiler room, Percy followed.

•

On the hall's wide staircase, Lili tended Eve as best she could, while Cally fussed over her mother, patting her shoulder, anxiety causing her little lower lip to tremble. The psychic dabbed a folded handkerchief on Eve's head wound, staunching the small flow of blood.

'It's not too bad,' she told Eve. There's not much blood now, but I think you'll have a sore head for a while.'

There was a dull, throbbing ache in Lili's own head, the consequence of being knocked out by the swing earlier (or maybe the results of the nightmarish visions that followed as she lay unconscious on the ground, she thought). She took the bloodied handkerchief away from Eve's head to examine the injury and was relieved to find the bleeding appeared to have stopped completely.

The hall was growing darker and Lili peered up at the ceiling, frowning at what she saw. She had been aware of it as soon as she entered the house with the old man when they had come after Gabe Caleigh: a slowly swelling darkness hung over the hall, a smoke-like substance from which dusky wisps descended like tendrils, the blackness sinking after them, deepening gradually so that soon the hanging lights of the iron chandelier were consumed. The smell, though, the fetid stink of corruption and bodily waste, seemed to permeate the hall, as did the extreme chill.

Eve tried to rise from the stair she rested on, but Lili pressed down on her shoulders to keep her there.

'I won't lose her, I won't lose her,' Eve repeated as she tried to resist the psychic's efforts.

'Loren will be all right,' Lili assured her quietly but firmly. 'The other man went down to help Gabe. Everything will be okay, you'll see.' But the psychic was more concerned than she let on. The person who now called himself Pyke was very strong. And fast. He had attacked Lili so quickly she'd barely had time to duck away from the blow. She hoped Gabe Caleigh was as capable as he looked.

Cally was the first to see the three figures emerge from the cellar and she shouted excitedly, 'Daddy, it's Daddy! He's got Loren!'

Eve moaned with relief, swaying so that Lili had to hold her steady.

•

The first thing Gabe noticed as he carried Loren from the cellar was that the great expanse of darkness overhead had deepened and become even denser than before. It had swallowed up the hall's upper reaches, almost smothering the chandelier and landing lights so that it was difficult to see across the vast room. Nevertheless, he could just make out Eve, Cally and Lili Peel on the stairs.

He was assailed by the stench that ruined the air, but he ignored it in his haste to reach Eve. As he splashed through puddles, Loren in his arms but looking round towards her mother, lightning flashed outside and washed the hall with its stark silver-white brilliance. The thunder that followed was like the boom of close cannon fire. He had never known a thunderstorm go on so long.

With Percy behind him, Gabe mounted the stairs and settled Loren in Eve's arms. Mother and daughter clung to one another, and their tears mingled on each other's cheeks. Gabe knelt beside them and squinted through the gloom at the blood smeared across his wife's forehead. She opened her eyes and they shone mistily with an emotional mix of joy, relief, fear and gratitude. He leaned forward and kissed her gently.

Lili interrupted. 'What happened to Pyke?' Her expression was anxious as she twisted the blood-soiled handkerchief in her fingers. Even in the encroaching gloom, Gabe could see her face was deathly pale.

'He's gone,' he replied, looking up from his wife.

Now there was alarm in the psychic's eyes.

'Pyke fell into the well that's down there,' Gabe added. 'It was an accident.' This wasn't the time to give her the full story.

'He's dead?' It was said in disbelief.

'I goddamn hope so,' he replied bitterly. Then: 'Yeah, he's dead. It's over.'

But his sense of smell picked up another odour amidst the concoction of foul stenches that polluted the atmosphere, one that was oddly familiar: a harsh aroma of strong soap. He noticed that Lili was looking past him, staring at something lower down on the staircase.

'Oh no,' she said in a low, quavering voice.

79: THE FLOOD

Despite the noise of the storm, the howl of the wind and the beating of rain on the tall windows, and as quietly as the words were spoken, each one of them looked up at Lili, who was on a higher step, then followed the direction of her stare with their own eyes.

It had no definite form to begin with—it was stronger than a mist, yet of no particular substance—but it evolved quickly, forming a definite shape as they watched in total silence. Within moments it had taken on the configuration of a man. A naked man, who held a slender stick in one hand. A man whose pallid body was cross-hatched with livid red stripes and blood spots over old weals and scars. A man with white hair that was shaved above the ears and whose black penetrating eyes glared back at them from dark shadows beneath a high, prominent brow.

He stood on the small, lower landing and Percy, who was a few steps below the others, voiced his name.

'Augustus Cribben,' he said in dismayed awe.

As if to dramatize the announcement, lightning strobed through the window over the stairs and the naked figure on the landing lost substance again, became translucent, nothing more than a vague apparition through which the landing rail and the torchère with its empty vase could be clearly seen. But when the searing light flickered away and thunder filled the air, it took on bulk once more, became a seemingly solid entity.

Gabe heard Loren give out a little shriek and Eve froze in his arms. Cally gripped his injured shoulder tightly, but the pain did not distract him. Percy took a stumbling step up, moving away from the pale spectre.

'Oh dear God…' Gabe heard Lili say from behind.

He half rose from the stair he'd been kneeling on, his body tensed as if he might throw himself at the bleeding and scarred phantom below.

As they watched, the ghost of Cribben raised the cane and whacked it against his own bare leg.
Swish-thwack!
was the sound it made. Those dark eyes focused on Loren.

Then Cribben moved forward as if to climb the stairs, eyes never leaving his prey.

Cally screamed, a frail cry over the storm, and Eve gathered Loren up and began to push her further up the stairs. Eve shivered as she went with her daughter, her head turned as if afraid to let the monster below out of her sight. The wound to her head was forgotten; everything was sharp again, in focus, the dizziness gone. It was all only too real.

In front of Gabe, Percy stopped climbing and stood his ground: Cribben was not going to get past him. Gabe, too, had resolved not to let the threat pass by; he clenched his fists, even though he wondered what the hell he could do to something that had no real body. Yet it looked so solid, so convincing, that he could not help but assume it had the power to physically harm a person. He swore under his breath.

But as the darkness above swelled and sank lower, rendering the lights to dim, useless glows, the hall becoming as night, Lili pointed upwards and cried out, 'Look! Look into it! Can you see them?'

Gabe glanced up and noticed lighter shadows moving within the murky black fog-like mass, shapeless forms that flitted and weaved in the greater darkness. There were many of them and they conspired to dive down into the thinner lower layers as if to burst through, but they swerved and soared again each time they came close. Until one finally broke away, seeming to use a wispy tendril that dropped from the core as a conduit, and it was quickly followed by another and another, emerging as white shadows that swooped towards the ghost on the stairs.

They swirled round Cribben as if to harass him, and soon they were joined by more white shadows, whirling round and round so that he appeared cocooned in them. He tried to beat them off with his punishment cane, but they deftly avoided it, then resumed their torment. Cribben's mouth opened in a defiant roar, his features deranged, but no sound emanated from him. The whirling white shadows began to condense, almost as if they were solidifying, and soon they had shrunk into small, glowing orbs, the lights Gabe had come upon in Cally's room days go. He tried to count them as they continued to beleaguer Cribben, but they were too fast and mingled too much.

They swarmed round Cribben like angry bees round a rambler who had disturbed their hive, darting to and fro, touching his phantom skin as though to sting, while he—it—swiped uselessly at them with the cane, silently screaming his annoyance. And then they were gone.

Gabe gaped. The tiny balls of light had shimmered once, then disappeared, leaving the ghost alone on the small landing. Cribben dropped the cane and brought his gnarled hands up to his temples as if in terrible pain. Did ghosts feel pain? Or was it the memory of pain? Gabe had no idea.

Lifting up his arms and turning his face towards the ceiling, Cribben stood with his eyes closed and his mouth open wide, the tendons in his neck stretched and visible, as though real, his spine arched in his apparent agony. Fresh blood pulsed from the self-inflicted wounds, weals appearing, opening up and immediately festering, while scars reddened and seemed ready to burst.

Gabe felt a sudden trembling at his feet. He looked down and the staircase beneath him was shaking. They all became conscious of a deep rumbling and Percy put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. The wall was vibrating. For a few moments they forgot about the vision on the landing below.

The rumbling grew into a steady roar and the whole building seemed to be shivering, even though its construction was of thick solid stone. Dust drifted down from the ceiling, falling through the thinning fog that had all but concealed the chandelier's lights. An earthquake, Gabe told himself, and he reached back for Eve's hand. Cally skipped down a couple of steps and threw her arms round his leg, while Loren buried her face into her mother's chest. The noise was becoming unbearable, frightening, rising to a crescendo, and the house was shaking as though an invisible force was running through its structure.

On the square landing Cribben continued to rage.

With a tremendous crash, the floodwaters smashed through the tall window, sending glass shrapnel slicing into the phantom before it. Gabe toppled backwards onto Eve and Loren with the shock, taking Cally with him, but he saw Cribben engulfed by the deluge and swept away, only his bloody hands appearing above the torrent of water. The ghost was slammed against the opposite wall as if it were human and Gabe thought, if the body had been real, then almost every bone would have been shattered such was the impact.

It was only Lili who understood that this was how Augustus Cribben had originally died, that this was a replay of his very last moments, and that unless his spirit passed over and ceased to haunt Crickley Hall, he would never rest in peace.

Still more water poured through the open front door to join with the main body of floodwater and surge around the grand hall, sweeping away furniture, bursting through into other rooms, lapping at the stairs, channelling down the cellar steps and flowing into the well, where it joined forces with the underground river to rage down to the sea bay. Soon, the whole cellar and boiler room next door were completely flooded.

Gabe groaned when the lights dimmed even more, then failed as the generator below was overwhelmed. Fortunately, Cally was still clinging to his leg and he could feel Eve and Loren's forms beneath him; he roughly hauled them to their feet.

Lightning brightened the hall again and he saw the floodwater was rising fast, its turbulent level already washing over the stairs just below where they all cowered.

'Come on!'
he yelled over the roll of thunder. 'The house is solid, but we gotta get higher. No way of telling how far the flood's gonna reach, but we should be okay on the top landing. If we have to, we can go all the way up to the dorm.'

Light dazzled them as Percy switched on the powerful torch that had been tucked away again in a pocket of his storm coat. He turned its beam towards the swelling waters and they saw something bright carried through the doorway to the cellar: it was the spinning top and it quickly disappeared from view, riding the current like a rubber raft.

Percy yelled at Gabe, pointing the torch in the engineer's direction:
'The floodwater will funnel into the well! It shouldn't rise much more than this!'

'Maybe! But well be safer if we move up!'
Gabe called back.

Percy showed the way ahead and they began to climb the trembling stairs. Before stepping onto the gallery landing Gabe, with Cally carried in his right arm, snatched a quick look over the stair rail into the hall. There wasn't a lot to see in the darkness, but he noticed that the tiny lambent orbs were back.

They skimmed above the surface of the rough swirling water like excited fireflies, exuberant with energy.

He counted nine of them.

80: SATURDAY

The river was unbelievably calm that morning, fast flowing still, but no longer swollen or threatening. The air smelt strongly of damp earth, and natural debris lay scattered everywhere: shrubbery, bushes, leaves, twigs and tree branches, even stones and sizeable rocks. Here and there, and particularly on the lower slopes of the gorge, whole trees had been uprooted. Two yellow Sea King rescue helicopters passed low over Crickley Hall, heading towards the bay, the sky above them a near-perfect blue with only a few puffball clouds floating in its expanse. A wide pre-constructed metal bridge spanned the river in place of the wooden bridge that had been swept away. Various vehicles, including an olive-green military lorry and two police cars, one unmarked, cluttered the nearby lane. (Pyke's Mondeo and Lili Peel's Citroën had been carried off down the hill by floodwater some time during the night and were now floating in the bay along with other wrecks and overturned fishing boats.) Parked on Crickley Hall's muddy front lawn were an ambulance with its rear doors open, a police van and a Land Rover 90.