'Then let's leave,' said Gabe firmly. 'Haunted or not, the sooner we're out of Crickley Hall, the better I'll like it. You okay, Percy?'
The gardener wiped a tear from his eye with the knuckle of a finger. 'I am, son,' he replied. 'It's like the young lady says, there's nothing here any more. It's just a big old ugly empty house an' I hope it stays that way fer a long time to come.'
A sound of barking outside distracted them all.
'Gabe…?' Eve looked up into her husband's face. 'That sounds like—no, it can't be.'
Gabe ginned as Chester appeared at the open door, Loren and Cally giggling behind him. The dog waited on the threshold for a second or two, as if uncertain. But as soon as he spotted Eve, he bounded and scooted through puddles towards her. As Chester slavered all over Eve, who had made the mistake of kneeling down to his level, Gabe caught Percy's eye.
Percy gave a reassuring nod of his head. There was nothing here to frighten Chester any more.
EPILOGUES
It was nurse Iris who found Magda Cribben's stone-cold corpse the morning after the big flood had hit the coastal village of Hollow Bay. Although such morning discoveries were not infrequent in a nursing home for the elderly, the nurse had to suppress a scream of fright when she walked into Magda's cell-like bedroom, for instead of lying peacefully in her bed, the old woman was sitting upright and fully dressed on her hard chair, facing the door, her body already stiff as if she had frozen there.
But it was the expression on Magda Cribben's face that upset Iris so: Magda's jaw was dropped, her toothless mouth open wide as if in a rictal cry of horror, and her lifeless eyes remained staring at the doorway—staring past Nurse Iris—as if her last sight was of something horrific entering the room.
•
They never recovered the body of Gordon Pyke, the man who had visited Crickley Hall on the night of what the locals called the Second Great Flood. They assumed that his drowned body had been carried by the underground river out to the sea and then to the ocean beyond. Either that, or it was still trapped somewhere in the underground river, snagged by rocks or washed into some subterranean cavern. After all, two bodies that had been lost since the last world war had only recently been found.
No one knew much about Pyke, so no one cared very much that his body was lost. To the older villagers, he was just another victim of Crickley Hall's curse.
•
Crickley Hall has remained empty for a year now. Potential buyers or those looking to rent are not attracted to the place. Its architecture is too severe, its ambience too depressing, they say. Some even compare it to a mausoleum despite (or maybe even because of) its grand hall.
Even the estate manager hates his monthly check on the property's condition. It's creepy, he likes to tell anyone who is not a possible client. Sometimes he hears noises, he claims. Oh, he knows that most are the usual sounds of trespassing rodents, birds in the chimneys or merely the house settling, but sometimes they are different from all those. Always faint. Always from rooms that are empty when he looks into them. But they are distinct.
They sound like:
Swish-thwack!
Swish-thwack!
Swish-thwack!
• • •
JAMES HERBERT is not just Britain's No. 1 bestselling writer of chiller fiction, a position he has held since the publication of his first novel, but he is one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books are sold in thirty-five other languages, including Russian and Chinese. Widely imitated and hugely influential, his twenty novels have sold more than fifty million copies worldwide.