… BLACK HELL
It shrieked at him from the pile of newspapers in the shop, the top copy folded back to page five. Two other customers bought copies while he was still staring.
You believe in ghosts, Lol?
Christ, he hadn’t seen this one coming, had he? Nobody had, judging from the comments in the shop. ‘I’ve heard of this feller,’ a woman in sweatpants told the newsagent. ‘He’s an alcoholic.’
‘On bloody drugs, more like,’ an elderly man said.
The newsagent nodded. ‘Need to be one or the other to live in that place.’
Whichever, it was a development Prof Levin did not need to know about, Lol decided, driving back from Bishop’s Frome with a bunch of papers on the passenger seat. It was eight-thirty, the sun already high: another hot one. Prof was due to leave for London before ten, his cases already stowed in the back of his rotting Range Rover – Abbey Road beckoning. The unstable virtuoso Tom Storey would already be pacing the floor with his old Telecaster strapped on, spraying nervy riffs into the sacred space.
Lol considered leaving the People in the Astra until after Prof had gone. Not as if he’d notice; all the time he’d been staying here, Lol had never once seen him open a newspaper; it was only Lol himself who was insecure enough to need to know the planet was still in motion.
In the end, he gathered the papers into a fat stack, with the Observer on top, and walked into the stables with it under his arm. He found Prof in the kitchen, connected to his life-support cappuccino machine, froth on his beard.
‘Two things, Laurence. One: when I return, I expect to hear demos of five new songs. No excuses. You get St John over to help. If he don’t want to come, you get his wife to kick him up the behind – metaphorically speaking, in her case, as you’ll find out.’
‘The vicar’s married?’
Prof gave him a narrow look. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No particular—’
Prof frowned. ‘Robinson, I can read you like the Sun. Who’s been talking about the vicar?’
‘What was the second thing? You said two things…’
‘The second thing – maybe I mentioned this before – is you keep that bastard Stock out of here. Bad enough he shows up when I’m around, I don’t want him—What? What’s going down? What’s wrong?’
Lol sighed. He didn’t want to pass on Stock’s innuendo about Simon. He unrolled the newspapers: Observer, Sunday Times, People. He handed the tabloid to Prof.
‘What’s this crap?’ Prof held up the paper, squinting down through his bifocals. ‘What am I looking at?’
Lol said nothing.
After about half a minute, Prof peered over the page at him, looking uncharacteristically bewildered, glassy-eyed, as if he’d been winded by a punch from nowhere to the stomach. He put down the paper on the upturned packing case he was still using as a breakfast bar.
‘This man,’ he said at last, ‘is the most unbelievable piece of walking shit it was ever my misfortune to encounter. Is there nothing in his life he won’t exploit?’
There were two pictures, one of them tall and narrow, running alongside the story. This was the Dracula’s Castle shot of the kiln house, doctored for dramatic effect. The other, near the foot of the page, showed an unsmiling Gerard Stock, holding a candle in a holder, his arm around a younger woman with curly hair.
OUR BLACK HELL IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR
by Dave Lang
A terrified couple spoke last night of their haunted hell in the grim old house where a relative was brutally murdered.
And they claimed that a ‘rural mafia’ had condemned them to face the horror alone.
Gerard and Stephanie Stock say their six-month ordeal in the remote converted hop-kiln has driven them to the edge of nervous breakdowns.
But when they asked the local vicar to perform an exorcism, he refused even to enter the house, which is so dark they need lights on all day, even in summer.
The couple inherited the 19th century kiln house near Bromyard in Here-fordshire from Mrs Stock’s uncle, Stewart Ash, the author and photographer who was beaten to death there by burglars less than a year ago.
Since they moved in at the end of last January, the Stocks say they have endured:
• creeping footsteps on the stairs at night.
• strange glowing lights in an abandoned hop-field at the front of the house.
• furniture moving around a bloodstain that won’t go away.
• an apparition of a hazy figure which walks out of solid brick walls.
‘It’s become a complete nightmare,’ said Mr Stock, a 52-year-old public relations consultant. ‘Everybody locally knows there’s something wrong in this place, but it’s as if there’s a conspiracy of silence. It’s a rural Mafia around here. And now it looks as if even the vicar has been “got at”.’
Turn to page 2
Prof shook his head slowly.
‘Madness, Laurence.’
‘You reckon?’
‘Nah.’ Prof turned over the page and creased the spine of the paper, laid it back on the packing cases next to his coffee cup, contemptuously punched the crease flat with the heel of a fist. ‘Not in a million frigging years. Let me finish this, and then we’ll talk.’
Lol read the story over Prof’s shoulder.
Mr Stock and his thirty-four-year-old wife say the house has proved impossible to heat, and they’ve built up massive electricity bills, running to hundreds of pounds.
And the already gloomy house was made even darker when neighbouring landowner Adam Lake built two massive barns either side of it, blocking light from all the side windows.
Mr Lake has claimed the buildings were necessary for his farming operation.
But Mr Stock claimed the landowner was furious because both they and Stewart Ash had refused to sell him the house and had the giant barns built to make the haunted kiln impossible to live in.
‘Lake showed up here once,’ Prof said. ‘Made me an offer for this place even though it wasn’t part of his old man’s original estate. Crazy. The guy’s as mad and arrogant as Stock. Dresses like some old-style squire twice his age. Campaigns for fox-hunting. Jesus!’
‘I saw him the other night.’
‘He’s a buffoon. And he don’t fully realize the kind of desperate bastard he’s up against – though maybe he does now.’
‘You really think Stock’s making all this up, to try and publicly shame Lake into moving those barns?’
‘Look,’ Prof said, ‘Stock’s on his uppers, right? Suddenly he gets a break; he wins a house. With problems attached, sure, but it’s a wonderfully unexpected gift, and he’s determined to capitalize. He wants the very maximum he can get. He’s gonna use whatever skills he’s got, whatever contacts. What’s he got to lose? Nothing, not even his credibility. What’s he got to gain? Jesus, those barns go, you can add seventy, eighty thousand to the market value of that place.’
‘Why doesn’t he just sell to Lake for some inflated price and walk away?’
Prof opened out his hands in exasperation. ‘Because he is Gerard Stock.’