The fourth haunting, p.1
The Fourth Haunting, page 1
The Fourth Haunting
Chapter 1
Pete Davidson was executive producing. Which meant that he was going to have to conjure from somewhere the finance for the project. Money men are in my experience prone to a higher than average level of scepticism. But with or without that, he had every right to ask any question of me he wanted to. And I knew that some of those questions would be bluntly uncompromising. That was okay. I had been the subject of low-level derision for the best part of three decades. It goes with the territory when you earn your living as what the tabloids insist on labelling a ghost hunter.
‘You’ve narrowed it down?’
I said, ‘Is that a budget-dependent question?’
He smiled tightly. ‘I’d rather not send a location crew to Haiti on open-ended visas.’
‘You’d prefer I find a location somewhere like Blackpool or Morecambe. A mini-van, a full petrol tank and a hand-held videocam.’
Another of his carefully rationed smiles. ‘You know what I mean, Tom.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Haiti is out. No voodoo. No blundering undead.’
‘Relieved to hear it. So where?’
‘Furthest afield, Chicago,’ I said. ‘Derelict Riverdale building with a history going back to when Capone and the mob ran the city. At various times a brothel, speakeasy and nightclub.’
Davidson twisted on his chair to look out of the window, though I don’t think he was seeing the view. ‘So far, so atmospheric,’ he said.
‘Seedy and dilapidated,’ I said. ‘And haunted.’
‘Allegedly haunted,’ Davidson said. ‘What are the other locations?’
‘A place at the foot of the Dolomites in Italy. Abandoned orphanage. Pretty remote, but no climbing involved.’
‘Again, relieved to hear it.’ He was thinking insurance.
‘A house in rural Ireland. Strictly speaking, a cottage, out in the peaty wilderness of County Clare. And a place off the East Coast of Scotland. The Darkling Rock Lighthouse.’
Davidson still had his eyes on the window and his mind very much on the TV series we were discussing. He said, ‘Why nowhere in London?’
‘Because ghosts don’t haunt to order?’
‘London would be beneficial.’
Budget again. I said, ‘You’d prefer the crew could get about using Oyster Cards?’
‘London has history,’ he said. ‘Unrivalled, turbulent, bloody history. Cobbles, mansion blocks. Abandoned underground stations. Buildings that were once asylums housing the criminally insane. It’s a ready-made film set and home to nine million people, a fair proportion of them eager to believe in at least some kind of afterlife.’
‘London is a cliché, Pete, where this subject is concerned.’
‘You’re going for originality?’
‘I’m going for authenticity,’ I said.
‘Chicago,’ he said. ‘In the Roaring Twenties.’
‘Not expecting any roaring, Pete. Physical disturbance is likelier.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. The past, resonating uninvited into the present.’
He frowned. ‘You really believe these four locations are haunted?’
‘The evidence seems to me to be both consistent and compelling. It’s an investigation and I’m at a very preliminary research stage of that investigation. But I think it’s fair to say I’m hopeful.’
Pete Davidson opened a desk drawer and took something out and slid it onto the blotter in front of him. I recognised the voice-activated recording device he only ever used when he was being serious. He ran the flat of a hand a bit wearily over his face and then steepled his fingers in a show of apparent concentration. He stared for a moment at his little machine and then raised his eyes to meet mine.
‘Chapter and verse,’ he said. ‘Though the verse doesn’t need to rhyme.’
And I began the sales pitch I’d been rehearsing through a pretty much sleepless night.
**********
Where did it begin? I can tell you when as well as where. I was 11 and living in a town on the Lancashire coast. I had an uncle who worked in demolition; a magpie uncle who would gather lead and copper on the job to be sold as scrap. Who would go through the abandoned cupboards and left-behind wardrobes in venerable buildings shortly to be reduced to dusty heaps of rubble. Owned a cocktail cabinet shaped like the prow of a ship. It was full of his hoarded booty. Pewter tankards, pairs of cuff-links, a silver hip-flask, an onyx cigarette lighter, wristwatches in various states of disrepair. A powerfully built man who could swing a sledgehammer with impossible finesse.
One day, when I was 11 and my brother nine, our uncle turned up because his lorry was in the vicinity and he knew our mother would brew him a mug of tea. I opened the door to a familiar figure in lathe-caked blue overalls and steel toe-capped boots. The unusual detail was the top hat he wore that early afternoon, perched improbably on his head.
He took off the hat and held it out for me to examine. The label sewn against the purple silk lining told me that this item had originated in Liverpool. There was no date on the label, but I knew it was probably Victorian or Edwardian, because looking at photos of how people used to dress was just one aspect of my burgeoning interest in history. It was obviously old. The smell of it, as well as the style of the label, told me that. But it was very sleek and stiff. This particular topper hadn’t seen a great deal of wear. Only a tiny smear of hair oil on the leather of the liner in a strip under the purple silk said that the hat had ever been worn.
‘You can have it, Tom,’ my uncle said, ‘If you want it. Maybe one day you’ll get to wear it at Aintree on Grand National Day. That’s a few years off, but it’s not very practical otherwise.’
I shared a bedroom then with my brother. I put the hat on top of the wardrobe we also shared, there at the foot of our beds, to the left of the bedroom door. And where over the coming days and weeks it seemed to insinuate its own character. It's still, silent blackness claimed the eye. It began to dominate my sightline as I lay dozing at night. I could see my brother too drawn to it in furtive glimpses. It brooded and impended and even seemed, unmoving and silent up there, to become somehow reproachful.
There came the day, or more probably the night, when both of us wanted to get rid of the hat. But by that time, neither of us dared touch it. We didn’t even need discuss that shared, singular fear. That growing distaste for this antique item of dress. A glance between us and as much was mutually understood.
What happened next, still came as a shock, as things that are inexplicable tend to be – a harsh lesson in life for an 11-year-old to learn.
My brother was asleep. It was around nine o’clock on an early summer evening and dusk was creeping across the room in crepuscular shadows. In the limited light, the top hat had a mat, velvety dullness to it, a fusty absence of life and stubborn unfamiliarity disturbingly at odds with everything else my eyes could inventory. Posters of popstars. Model aeroplanes sharing shelf space with the Dinky replica of James Bond’s Aston Martin car. A solitary, straight-backed, painted chair.
And then I heard it. A single bark of high, shrill, sardonic laughter pierced the silence and thrust a shard of ice through my heart. It was human, and adult, and scornful. And it came from within that small, confined space, where there was emphatically no one there to be responsible for it.
It awoke my startled brother. He shifted his back up into a sitting position, raising his counterpane like a barrier against his chest.
‘We have to get rid of it, Tom.’
‘I know. I know we do.’
I got it down. It was light and loathsome in the grip of my right hand. I knew that taking it to the end of our back garden and leaving it there as darkness gathered would be an ordeal. But I thought if we left it where it was, its dead owner might rouse and confront us in the small hours. That bark of laughter had been a good trick. But I thought it might just be a taster for something more substantial later on. Neither of us were imagining that brooding, impending mood the hat had imposed over the weeks in the refuge where we slept. And it was strengthening, wasn’t it? It was making our bedroom a place of hazard and nightmare.
Towards the bottom of the garden, I lost my nerve. I threw the hat and it careened in darkness across night blackened grass on its brim, until coming to a stop against our garden hedge. In moonlight, it lay at a jaunty angle, as though being raised in greeting.
I fled back to the house with my hands clamped over my ears. To this day I don’t think that would have hindered the sound of laughter had any repetition occurred, but it didn’t, and the next morning I took the top hat in an empty coal sack to the local tip and climbed to the top of one of the long hills of household rubbish there and tossed it into one of the ravines made by old tin cans and torn mattresses and items of junked upholstery and television sets with smashed screens. Recycling was very much a remote thing of the future back then. And the tip up there on The Moss at the edge of Southport teemed with rats. But rats did not bother me. It was laughing phantoms, did that.
I tried to forget about the top hat. I tried to forget to the point that I never again mentioned it to my brother. Though to be honest, it had never exactly been what you would call a conversation piece. Neither of us had ever discussed it beyond expressing the urgent need for it to go.
Then one Saturday afternoon, I switched from World of Sport to BBC 2 and an ancient black and white film starring Fred Astaire. Probably directed by Busby Berkley, though I would not have known that then. Fred looked char
Demolition then was a six day a week job and mobile phones had not been invented. My uncle didn’t own a landline and neither, in those days, did we. So giving him time for a lie in, I went around to his house at 11am on Sunday. Where he was on the street outside doing something mechanical to his van that had covered his hands to his wrists in black and viscous oil. He had the bonnet up and was peering knowledgeably at the pipes and cylinders and electrical wiring of the engine. It seemed to me back then there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do.
‘Uncle Terry?’
‘Uncle Tom.’
He always called me that.
‘What do you know about the top hat you gave me?’
He frowned and dipped his fingers into a tin of Swarfega balanced on the van’s wing and rubbed them together and started to clean his hands with a rag.
‘You’ve walked two miles on a Sunday morning to ask me that? My dog’s got more sense.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘Found it in a wardrobe in one of those big Victorian Houses on Weld Road. Council doesn’t like to see them demolished, but this one had been derelict for 20 years. Half the slates missing, rotten roof joists, floorboards riddled with woodworm, damp in all but two or three of the rooms. Wonder the topper wasn’t rotted, or at least mildewed, but that room was dry.’
‘Who lived there?’
‘Someone a bigwig in shipping in Liverpool. Miserable bugger apparently. Lived there alone. A recluse, like. The boss would likely know a bit more.’
‘Can I come around tomorrow night?’
‘I’ll pop in to see you and your brother about six.’
He walked to the back of his van. I knew what was coming next. He took a bottle of Woodpecker Cider out of the van and unscrewed the stone stopper. He said, ‘Wet your whistle with a mouthful of that for the walk back. Hot day already.’
My Uncle Terry. A man of few words, kind gestures and family jokes. I knew instinctively there had been no malice in his giving me the top hat. Events had just taken their own queer turn for a reason neither of us knew. I decided I wouldn’t burden him with what had happened. I would tell nobody, never discuss its morbid detail with anyone. The cider was warm and sharp tasting, a refreshing couple of swigs welcomed by my parched throat. It made me feel quite light-headed on the familiar walk home. Which at the age I was, is not surprising.
The route home took me along Cemetery Road, which explains itself, the cemetery large and spectacular, huge tombs and monuments and mausoleums from Victorian times, granite and veined marble weather-pitted, blemished by lichen and moss, celebrations of life – and death – carved out of reluctant stone.
I know words now I did not know, back then. But the feelings evoked by that great necropolis were usually no different from how they would be today. Names and dates etched and fading. Bible quotations and snatches of verse. Perished blooms on stems warping through the metal grilles of small vases. Quarried slabs canted to odd angles. The subsidence caused by marshy soil and the imperious weight it was never fit to anchor. Splendour and grief, slipping and lurching over time into folly and under it all the indifferent dead, rotting to dust in wormy boxes fashioned once from expensive wood with burnished brass handles for the coffin bearers to grasp.
Sometimes, more often than not, I’d cross the cemetery on a diagonal as a short-cut. It meant climbing a wall at the far end, with a long drop onto a grassy field on the other side of it. And I was agile enough for the jump. But on this occasion, something was different. I did not feel like being in such close proximity to death as to have to pick a route between the graves. Not even in daylight. Not even in the bright sunshine probably just then reaching its zenith. Even slightly giddy from the cider, I didn’t at all fancy it. I could still hear the echo of that bark of night laughter, still shiver at its tone of scornful contempt. And its impossibility.
I opened our front door to my uncle just after six o’clock the following evening. I didn’t wear a wristwatch back then, but my mother had our TV constantly switched on and the early evening news had just started. Uncle Terry’s open face, with its pale blue eyes, wore an expression more complex than I could remember having seen on it before. Somewhere between embarrassment and guilt, I thought. A bit shameful. He would have been around 37 years old back then and was not destined for a long life. But on this occasion, he looked childlike.
‘Uncle Terry.’
‘Evening, Uncle Tom.’
There were pubs out towards Ormskirk on a route very rural still, back then. They were proper country pubs. The term-child friendly had not yet been thought of. It was more a case of landlords being indifferent to your age if you were accompanied by an adult with the legal entitlement to buy their wares. I sat in the passenger seat of my uncle’s battered Austin A40 as he drove, wordlessly. My thoughts were an anticipatory jumble. But I do remember thinking that whatever mechanical alchemy he’d performed the previous morning, it was working a treat. The engine had a throaty purr and when he pressed his foot on the accelerator, the car surged forward, rocking on its suspension, narrow tyres lightly adhered to the cooling tarmac.
He got us drinks and we took a table in the pub garden, scantly populated so early on a Monday evening. I sipped at my half of bitter. He cradled his pint of mild in the bludgeoning fist of his hand. The silence stretched out. My uncle studied the sky, so I did the same. An unsullied blue. Far fewer vapour trails back in those days.
Eventually, and quietly, he said, ‘I’ve learned a bit about the original owner of the top hat I gave you. It’s made me regret doing so, to be honest with you.’
‘Go on.’
He looked at me, blinked slowly and then spoke again. ‘Not everyone in the world is good. You’re a bright lad, so that penny will have dropped with you by now.’
I nodded. Most of the bad pennies I had encountered had been on the screen, in films. But I knew what he meant.
He might have read my mind. He said, ‘Real life isn’t like the films, Tom.’
‘I know that.’
‘What I mean is, the baddies in real life don’t always get what should be coming their way.’
‘I’ve heard about police corruption on the news,’ I said. ‘They’re doing a big investigation into the Flying Squad.’
He smiled. He said, ‘It can be a lot more subtle than bribing a copper.’
‘Meaning?’
My uncle hesitated. Then he said, ‘The gentleman who owned the top hat was a shipping broker named Edward Swarbrick. He was the son of a shipping broker, someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He went to Merchant Taylor’s School and then to Oxford University.’
I shrugged, ‘Isn’t that what rich people do?’ I took a sip of bitter. I didn’t really like the taste of bitter. It was what adults called an acquired taste and I had not yet acquired it.
‘He was expelled from university in his first year. They call it being sent down. Some scandal that was hushed up and then he went to work for his dad and by the time he was 40 he was very successful and bought that big Weld Road house we demolished not so long ago.’
‘Where you found the top hat.’
‘Aye, where I found Swarbrick’s topper.’
‘Go on.’
My uncle paused. Then he said, ‘There were rumours Edward Swarbrick interfered with kids.’
‘Little girls?’
‘Little boys too. But rumours are not facts. And the police tend to regard the testimony of a child as unreliable. Especially when the finger is being pointed at someone of Swarbrick’s stature.’
‘He got away with it?’
‘The police knew he was a recluse. And a cold fish. But they thought the stories swirling around him no more than malicious gossip stoked by envy.’
‘Why would children tell lies about him?’
‘Children might be egged on to do it by jealous parents. The feeling was it was the parents encouraging lies about a prosperous man whose only real crime was being a loner.’
Something ominous was coming. I could just tell it was, by my uncle’s sombre tone and the expression in his eyes. Usually, they had this blue, amused sparkle. Like their owner could always see the bright side of life. Just then they had a dead aspect to them. There was a moment of silence, then, that was not really silence at all. Birds were singing loudly in the trees in a ragged chorus. I heard a high-pitched giggle, disembodied, from inside the pub’s open door. The sound made by a young woman, tickled by something someone had just said to her. Normal background noises that in this strange interlude I was undergoing, did not seem normal at all.
