In fact, he had used a large family group—three boys, one about his own age, two girls and their mother—to get past the ticket collector on the day he'd arrived in the heart of the capital on the West Country train, the day he had left Magda Cribben sitting alone on the distant platform. From their chatter, he had gleaned that the boys and girls were evacuees like himself and that their mother had decided to bring them home to London now that the bombings had stopped; it was simple to merge with them among all the other arrivals, then pass unnoticed through the barrier, the collector having no time to count the tickets.
The hauntings had begun just before he broke his leg—indeed the first one was the prime cause of the injury. It had been a chilly April night and he was in a house whose upper floors had been gutted. Maurice snuck into a corner over creaky floorboards, pulling the collar of the over-sized overcoat that a kindly market porter had given him tight around his neck and jaw. Moonlight shone through two glassless windows, spreading across the floor of what once must have been a front parlour. All furniture and ornaments had been salvaged (or looted), for the room was quite empty save for rubble and shattered glass. Weary from a morning's work and roaming the bustling streets—war or no war, the city carried on as normal, the difference being that most of the women wore cheap, dull or homemade clothes, while the majority of men were middle-aged or elderly, those that were younger usually wearing military uniforms, and there were walls of sandbags protecting doorways and tape criss-crossing windows—Maurice soon drifted off to a fractured sleep, too uncomfortable and cold to lie peacefully.
He wasn't sure what woke him—a policeman outside on his rounds, an ARP warden on his way somewhere—something had interrupted his uneasy slumber anyway. He peeked out from his corner, the lapel tips of his coat touching over his chin. If there had been a noise—maybe a rat scuttling through the debris—it was gone now. Maurice snuggled down again, a shoulder fitting into the corner, but no sooner had he closed his eyes than he opened them again. Squinting, he peered into the shadowy corners opposite. There was someone standing in one of them, he was sure. Someone moving in the blackness. Moving out as if to cross the room in his direction.
He gave a little whimper and drew his knees up to his chest, trying to make himself smaller, less easily seen. The shape stopped in the clearly defined light from one of the windows and he saw that it was a man. And there was something familiar about him, the skinny body, the white hair lit by the moon, the rigid stance. Maurice recognized who it was from that alone.
How had Augustus Cribben found him here in London? How could he know where Maurice sheltered? Why was he naked? How could he walk through the rubble without disturbing it or making a noise? Then the boy realized the moonlight was shining through the figure! Maurice caught his breath.
At the orphanage before Crickley Hall, one of the female carers, a hefty woman with a ruddy face and wiry hair, had delighted in telling the children bedtime stories about hauntings, and she had claimed that all ghosts were transparent, you could see right through them. And now Maurice could see the shape of the smashed windows through Augustus Cribben.
The boy's eyes bulged as if ready to pop from their sockets, and the hairs at the back of his neck seemed to divide and stand straight. Was Cribben dead? Was this his ghost?
Maurice screeched, a high-pitched terrified sound that shot through the murky London air. He scrambled to his feet, his shoulder brushing against the wall, wiping off dirt and dust, while the ghost, now unmoving, looked on. The boy screeched again, pushing his back into the corner as if to sink through it. The room had become bitterly cold and Maurice saw his own breath materialize in front of him. The limpid image of Augustus Cribben remained still, but Maurice could feel the eyes, even though they were hidden in shadows, boring into his.
Never before had Maurice been so frightened, not even when he and Magda had ran out of Crickley Hall all those months ago. It was as if something bad, something frigid had seized his mind, his body. What did the ghost want from him?
With a panicky wail, he made a dash for the doorless opening on the other side of the room, skirting round the flimsy vision that merely turned to follow his progress. He was halfway there when the bomb-weakened floorboards collapsed inwards, sending Maurice plummeting down into the basement below.
Timber and bricks fell with him, three bricks joined together glancing off his head, debris of cracked floorboards landing on his left leg, pinning it to the stone floor. The blow to the head, although stunning him and causing blood to pour, failed to distract him from the pain of his broken leg.
Maurice screamed and screamed before passing out and the last thing he saw as he slipped into unconsciousness was a face looking down at him from the opening above. It wasn't Cribben's face.
•
An indistinct bulk sitting in the darkness of the car, he bit into his lip. The rain, the wind, was unremitting and Maurice flinched at the bitter torment of memories.
His mood had changed. The calmness had left him for the moment.
It had been the first of the hauntings that were eventually to undermine his sanity. Followed by the dreams that had lost him his freedom for a while when he was young.
•
The man who had rescued him from the cellar (and perhaps who had chased away the ghost) was an ARP warden called Henry Pyke, and he and his wife, Dorothy, would play an important part in the boy's life from then on.
The national dailies carried the story of the 'mystery boy' found in the ruins of a building and who had lost his memory due to a blow to his head (it was thought). It made the front pages for more than a week, his photograph, which had been taken while he was in hospital recovering from his injuries, printed large for the first three days, the caption beneath appealing for anyone who knew the boy's identity to come forward. No one ever did. The picture released to the press was too bleached out, worse when it was reproduced, and a bandage covered his forehead, so that even the market traders for whom he had done odd jobs failed to recognize him.
The boy had been unable to tell the authorities anything about himself—what his name was, who his parents were, how he came to be in the bomb-gutted house where he was found. His photograph was even circulated among the troops in England and abroad, but still no one claimed him for their own. Eventually it was suggested that perhaps both his parents had perished in the earlier Blitz, and the boy, lost and confused, had roamed the streets ever since. There appeared to be no other explanation.
Public interest waned and the story was relegated to a couple of column inches on the inside pages, while the frontpage headlines returned to more urgent world events.
The anonymous boy spent the next six months in hospital recovering from his injuries—his left leg had been badly broken—and the doctors hoped his memory would return of its own accord. But it never did.
Because of his size and his evident maturity, the patient's age was approximated at fourteen years, and Maurice, whose memory was fine, did not disagree with them (he was by now thirteen years of age anyway). Henry Pyke, the Air Raid Precautions warden who had discovered Maurice and carried him up from the cellar, had taken a special interest in the boy and had visited him several times a week at the hospital. As time went by and the 'lost' boy remained unclaimed, the warden began to bring his wife to see him. Theirs was a childless marriage and for years they had longed for a son or daughter. They grew so fond of Maurice, who was shy and well-mannered and had a wonderful shine to his eyes, that they decided that if the boy's parents or relatives were not found soon, then they themselves would apply to adopt him for their own. And that was precisely what happened. The authorities had not known quite what to do with the amnesic boy, and the Pykes had provided the ideal solution. They would allow the couple, who were in their early forties and now unlikely to have a child themselves, to foster the boy for a year or so with a view to full adoption.