Miss Willis set the rumour mill going well ahead of time. More than one person asked me, ‘Is it really true there’s a visitor coming to give a talk who’s got a real ghost in a box?’ I had to say that I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem very likely. I was still regarded as an authority on the supernatural. One little fuse-poltergeist and you’re an expert for life!
I was intrigued enough to ask Luke who our visitor was, but all he said was, ‘Nobody special — just some old duck,’ which made me wonder if he enjoyed Miss Willis’s confidence as much as he once had.
On the appointed afternoon we assembled in the main hall. Marion’s voice rang out in plump authority. ‘Boys of Vulcan School! It is a great pleasure to introduce our guest — and my personal friend — Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Anna was living in the Castle before most of you boys were even thought of. It was her father the Colonel who placed the advertisement in the paper which Mr Raeburn and I answered all those years ago. Of course Anna knew the Castle as it was before we made our recent modifications, but I hope she gives her approval!’ To which Anna Mitchell-Hedges returned a twisted smile. ‘Anna and her father spent their lives travelling the world, surviving many dangers and discovering many things. In her time she has given a pedicure to the Duke of Windsor, and she has also landed the heaviest hammerhead shark ever caught by a woman — weighing fifteen hundred pounds!
‘She has brought one of her treasures to show to you today, a treasure which is much older than even the oldest part of the Castle. Please make her welcome, boys!’
We made her welcome, this strange, rather sunken creature with grey hair and a cold and grating voice.
‘Thank you, Miss Willis. It is a joy to me to see that what was once my home is giving hospitality to so many fine boys.’ It was odd to hear her speaking so coldly of joy. Her smile was like a winter night. ‘Now I must have darkness, total darkness.’ Presumably Marion had been briefed about this requirement beforehand. She went over to the windows and tugged the curtains scrupulously across. Then she went over to the door and turned the lights off.
In the darkness we could hear a succession of thrilling, slightly sinister noises. Miss Mitchell-Hedges’ voice came again in the darkness: ‘And now, dear friends, some music.’ There was a heavy click, and a tape-recorder started to play some music. I recognised it. It was the frightening music from Fantasia, from the bit with the spooks. ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’. It didn’t frighten me. If there was anything that did give me a moment of goose-flesh, it was Anna Mitchell-Hedges saying the words ‘dear friends’. She didn’t sound as if she’d ever had a friend in her life.
She made the music quieter, so that she could speak properly over it. ‘And now for some light …’ But she didn’t ask Miss Willis to turn the lights in the room back on. Instead she clicked on a powerful torch which she was holding just beneath an object on the desk in front of her. The light shone through the object. The light was red. There was a red lens on the torch. The only light in the room came from that torch, and reached us by passing through what was sitting on the desk before her, facing us with its grin. Miss Mitchell-Hedges made small passes with the torch, so that the red light wavered and cast changing shadows.
This was the moment, after the clunks and the click and the spooky music, when I started to hear another sound. A low continuous banging, with a moan inside it.
It was also the moment when Anna’s voice took on an oddly crooning quality. ‘What you are looking at, dear boys,’ she said, ‘and what is looking back at you, is an object full of value and danger. It is valuable because it is one of a very few in the world. The British Museum has another such object, but that has not been authenticated. And it is dangerous because of what it can do to those who under-estimate it. What it has done, indeed, to those who have shown it disrespect.
‘The Skull maintains an unvarying temperature of seventy degrees, no matter what its surroundings. It changes colour, even against a neutral background. Sometimes it goes a cloudy white, sometimes a dark spot expands until the whole Skull goes black.
‘This terrible, beautiful artefact was made from a huge piece of rock quartz, worn down into its shape by efforts that must have taken hundreds of years. The Mayans had no chisels, boys, they did not have so much as sand-paper. What they had was sand. The crystal was worn down by hand. Think of that! The sand wearing down both the crystal and the hands that rubbed it, year after year. They must have been slaves, I think, who did the rubbing, knowing that if they did their work well and finished the task that had been set their ancestors, then the blood of their descendants might moisten the stone and satisfy its thirst …
‘This is the Skull of Doom, made by the Maya people of South America. I was led to discover it in 1924. It has knowledge beyond our own. In ancient sacrifice it was used to bring about the death of tribal enemies. The Mayans would spill blood on it to make it work. Human blood.
‘Once you have been cursed by this Skull, there is nowhere for you to run to in this world. Or the next.
‘One man who spoke out against the power of the Skull developed a fever in three days and died. Another fell down a mine-shaft, a third went insane. One man in Africa was struck by lightning — out of a clear blue sky. Even to think bad thoughts about the Skull can bring sickness and death.’
The banging with the moaning inside it was getting louder, making a strong contribution to the oppressive atmosphere. I was sure I hadn’t secretly thought anything wrong about the skull, but I can’t say I felt very relaxed about it. While Miss Mitchell-Hedges was talking she let two fingers of one hand, the index and the little, slide down the front of the Skull onto its eye-sockets, interrupting the red light from the torch. The effect was eerie — all right, it was downright frightening. She was covering up the empty eyes of the Skull, but she seemed rather to be producing two searching beams of darkness. The gesture had something in it that was unlike a person touching an object. There was a sensual element, as if flesh was touching flesh, gloating at the contact. She was really milking the mood. If you like a captive audience, the disabled are always going to be at the top of your list.
‘As you know, boys, Farley Castle used to be my home. The Skull lived here with me for many years. It knows the building well. It would be wise for each of you to remember that something of the Skull has always been here. Something of the Skull will remain here, even after it returns to its case and travels home with me to Reading.’
At this point in her spook show she nodded to Miss Willis, who was waiting by the light switch and restored the room to its normal state. Anna Mitchell-Hedges turned off the torch and pressed the Stop button on the tape-recorder. She had a little colour in her face now, as if she had had a transfusion under cover of darkness. She seemed a little drunk, even, on the fear she had summoned up.
‘In a moment the brave ones among you may inspect the Skull at close quarters. Do you have any questions?’ This formula always creates a silence. Miss Willis raised her hand.
The sound in the room which had been bothering me for some time was still going on, but now I knew what it was. Little ‘Half-Pint’ Stevie Templeton, athetoid spastic, who could be jumpy and twitchy at the best of times, was jumping up and down very violently in his wheelchair. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons Mr Wooffindin the English teacher would read to us from The Lord of the Rings, and Stevie would become very agitated when he heard about the Dark Riders, but this was something else again. Poor Stevie! She was pouring fully a quart of anguish into that half-pint pot.