The Secret of Crickley Hall

That's why you came here? The children brought you here?'

'They called me. I had to come.'

A week ago, she might have thought the psychic's words were self-delusional, but everything had changed for Eve now. Eve believed Crickley Hall was being haunted by the ghosts of children who had once lived in the house. But they were not alone; there was a darker entity here also. Eve herself sensed this.

Her question was in earnest. 'Why do you think they've called you, Lili? There has to be a reason, doesn't there? The hauntings must have a purpose.'

But in answer, the psychic merely closed her eyes and mentally reached out to the orphans who had died in Crickley Hall. Nothing happened. She could not visualize them. Yet the first time she had entered the house she had almost been overwhelmed by a great pressure, an emotional barrage that had made her feel faint. She knew there was contact between herself and the spirits here—she sensed their unhappiness, their pleadings—but they had not come through clearly. Something or someone was holding them back. Something or someone they feared. And now she could sense it herself.

Lili's eyes snapped open as if she had been physically stunned. Whatever it was, it was feeding off the psychic energy of the house's occupants, including her own. She could feel strength draining from her.

'It's more powerful than them,' she murmured, more to herself than Eve.

Eve touched her arm. 'Lili, are you all right?'

But the psychic looked puzzled rather than weakened.

'There's something very wrong.' Lili looked around, her eyes wide. She looked at the cellar door, which was ajar; she looked up at the L-shaped landing, which was empty. She looked at the broad, imposing staircase and she shuddered.

'Sometimes stairways act like a vortex for spirits,' she told Eve. 'It's because there's so much energy there with people using it all the time, and the spirits are drawn to that energy. There's something there but I can't tell what it is.'

Lightning flashed outside the tall window over the stairs, blanching each separate pane of glass. Thunder seemed to roll along the roof itself.

'Eve!' Lili suddenly said, making the other woman start. 'D'you have anything that belonged to the children? The children who died here, I mean. Anything that might have been left behind years ago.'

Eve shook her head and was about to say no, when she remembered the items Gabe had found hidden behind the landing cupboard. The Punishment Book, the thin, supple cane—the photograph of the Cribbens with the children!

'Wait here,' she told the psychic and dashed into the kitchen, leaving Lili alone in the cavernous hall.

Lili took a moment to study the pools that spread across the floor. There were no drips from the high ceiling that she could see, and how could the water seep through the floor if there was a cellar below? Maybe there was a layer of earth or a cavity between floor and cellar ceiling that rainwater could have soaked into from underneath the property's solid walls.

Eve hurried back from the kitchen clutching a photograph in one hand and a child's colourful toy, an old-fashioned spinning top, in the other. She showed Lili the spinning top first.

'It's a toy Gabe and I found in a locked storeroom next to the children's dormitory. There was a lot of stuff in there—more toys and school things. All the toys were old but looked new. We think they'd never been used.' Eve eyed the spinning top nervously. 'Once we'd wiped off the dust, it came up like this. When I was alone last Monday, I spun it and saw the ghosts of the children.'

'You mean you saw their images in the top?' Lili pointed to the graphics printed on the spinning top's metal shell.

'No. I saw real children here, in the hall. Except they weren't real, they were ghosts. They were dancing in a circle. But Mr Pyke suggested that watching the top spinning—listening to the humming noise it made as it spun fast, seeing the colours turn to white—might have caused me to hallucinate.'

'Who's Mr Pyke?' Lili asked, curious.

'He came yesterday. He calls himself a ghost-hunter, a psychic investigator, and he convinced Gabe he could prove the house wasn't haunted. He's here now, upstairs in the old dormitory arranging his equipment. Loren is with him.'

Eve realized that Pyke and her daughter had been gone a long time. Mr Pyke may have been charming, but what did they know about him? She began to grow anxious.

The psychic took the toy from Eve and inspected it.

'Maybe the children did play with it before it was taken away and put in the storeroom.' Lili lightly ran her fingers over the top's brightly coloured surface. 'I can feel a connection with them.'

'And here's a photograph Gabe found. It was hidden behind a false wall in a cupboard upstairs.' Eve proffered the old black-and-white picture.

Lili placed the spinning top on the floor at her feet and accepted the photograph. She felt her heart leap when she held it in her hands, for at last she could see the children who had come to Crickley Hall as evacuees, she could know what they looked like.

She examined each face in turn, beginning with the back row, frowning once, then moving on. She came to a pretty young woman whom Lili assumed was one of the teachers; there was something infinitely sad in her countenance.

In the middle of the front row of smaller children and seated on chairs were a man and woman of similar features to each other. They both looked hard, mean, and they seemed to regard the camera with hostile suspicion. A disturbing flutter ran through Lili and she quickly looked away.

But her eyes returned to the one child—although he looked more than a child and was certainly older than the others—that she had frowned at before. The boy was grinning, the only person in the photograph to do so, but his eyes did not match the grin. They were sly, mad eyes. Lili sensed it.

She swayed unsteadily and Eve thought the psychic was about to faint again. But Lili caught herself.

Pointing at the grinning boy in the photograph, she said: 'D'you know anything about him?'

'As a matter of fact, I do,' Eve replied. 'The gardener here has worked for different owners of Crickley Hall for ever, it seems. Percy was even here when the evacuees came down from London to stay. He told us about that particular boy and it was nothing good. The other children didn't like him, but apparently he was a favourite of the Cribbens. I think his name was Maurice. Maurice something-or-other. Stannard? No, it was Stafford. Maurice Stafford.'

'I sense bad things about him.' Lili frowned again and this time it was more deeply, more concentrated. 'There's something wrong with him. I think he was very wicked.'

'He was just a boy,' Eve said. 'He was too young to be wicked.'

'This one was born that way. It wasn't something he learned. There's some kind of connection between him and the two adults at the front. You called them the Cribbens—husband and wife?'

'Brother and sister.'

'Yes, the likeness is obvious. This boy, Maurice Stafford, he learned evil from those two. I can feel it so strongly. Oh God—' the photograph shook in the psychic's hands—'it's becoming clearer. He did the children great harm.'

She closed her eyes.

'They're trying to tell me, the children are trying to speak to me. They're here. Eve, the children are still in this house. They've never left it.'

Her eyes opened.

'Can't you sense them?' she asked Eve.

And Eve could sense something. No, she could hear something. A susurration of whispers. Growing in volume, filling the corners of the hall. She gasped when the colourful top on the floor began to turn slowly.

The sounds were of young voices, all whispering words she could not understand because one overlaid the other, all mixed together so that they were incoherent. But she knew they were frightened voices. The clamour rose, but still only in whispers, and the top spun faster. Eve looked at Lili, confused and mystified.