The Secret of Crickley Hall

foot resting at an angle on the first step down, his left on the one below that. He laid his walking stick down behind him, its hooked end pointing at Eve. Lightning from outside lit up one side of his face as he looked their way and Eve thought his grin was the most evil grimace she had ever seen.

He waited as thunder split the air and rolled away into the distance. When it was quiet again he spoke. 'Please don't worry yourself, Eve. It isn't you I want.'

In the poor, generator-powered light she saw his grin slip to a smile and his eyes had lost that manic gleam she was so afraid of. He seemed his old charming self again. But Eve drew up her left leg so that her foot was out of reach.

•

Stretched out on the rain-sodden lawn, Lili murmured something that was not quite a word. The fingers of one of her hands had clenched, digging shallow grooves in the soil.

It wasn't exactly a dream she was having, it was more of an extrasensory perception that conveyed itself as if it were a dream.

Thoughts, sights, came to her. She began to see what had happened to the evacuees at Crickley Hall in the month of October sixty-three years ago.

•

'The little Jewish boy was the first of the children to go. You might say he was the cause of all their deaths. And the young teacher; she was partially to blame.'

Gordon Pyke had leant back against the rail so that he faced Eve and Loren on the stairs. His walking stick was close to hand should mother and daughter attempt to escape up the stairs again.

'Augustus and Magda Cribben hated the Jews, blamed them for the whole of World War Two, in fact,' Pyke sniggered. 'They thought Hitler had got it about right—exterminate all Jews, with their global intrigues and secret cabals. I honestly believe the Cribbens hoped the Germans would win the war.'

He gave a wry shake of his head and his thoughts lingered for a few moments.

Then: 'Now what was the boy's name? He was the youngest of the children. Oh yes, Stefan. Stefan Rosenberg. No, Stefan Rosenbaum, that was it. See how well I remember? It's as if it was yesterday. God, how angry Augustus was when he found out the authorities had foisted a Jew on him. And how the boy suffered because of it.'

Eve shivered and pulled Loren closer. Her daughter was trembling and seemed afraid to make a sound.

Pyke continued in his mild-mannered way. 'Our guardian made a discovery about the boy one day. I should mention that Augustus was very ill at the time. He'd always suffered severe headaches, according to his sister, Magda, but a head injury during the Blitz had caused more and, apparently, irrevocable damage to his brain. At least, that was Magda's opinion.

'Augustus was going through one of his bad spells when the headaches were almost paralysing, and Stefan Rosenbaum had done something wrong—I forget precisely what it was; I think he'd wet his bed, something like that—and Augustus was about to punish him. In a rage, Augustus made the boy drop his trousers—this time the misdemeanour was serious enough to warrant a caning on bare flesh. When Stefan did so, Augustus saw that he hadn't been circumcised. All Jewish males had to be circumcised, Augustus screamed. Magda pleaded with her brother, but this was the beginning of the madness…'

•

Lili's murmur became a groan. There were scenes being played out inside her head, like a dream but not a dream: it was a psychic vision. The event was in the past and it was shocking.

A little boy. A little boy with dark hair and large frightened eyes. He is in the grip of a man who seems familiar to Lili. The man is wicked. And insane.

He's shaking the little boy, screaming at him, and the boy is wailing in terror, which only makes the man more angry and the shaking more violent. There are other children around, but they are frightened too and so they run away to hide, to hide from the man whom Lili now recognizes from the old black-and-white photograph, the children's guardian, the man Eve had called Augustus Cribben. He is picking up the howling boy whose trousers are bunched around his ankles. The man is taking the boy into a room where there are tables and benches set out like a schoolroom. He lays the boy on the main desk, the teacher's desk, and tells the woman—the woman must be Magda Cribben, Lili realizes—to hold the boy there and wait.

Augustus Cribben soon returns and Lili cries out in her semi-conscious trance, for in his hand he holds a gleaming cutthroat razor, no doubt the very one he uses himself for shaving.

Magda Cribben brings up a hand to her throat and she pleads with her brother not to do this, that the authorities will find out if anything happens to the boy. But her brother is undeterred: he reaches for the boy's tiny penis.

To one side stands a tall boy, one of the orphans yet not one of them. There is an excited glint in his eyes.

Cribben calls for him to help pin the dark-haired boy down and Maurice Stafford eagerly comes forward. He leans his strong upper body on the younger boy's legs so that they are trapped, and his hand presses down on the little boy's chest, holding him flat on his back against the table.

Augustus slashes with the razor.

But the cut is too hasty, too imprecise, too deep, and the blood spurts from the little boy's penis…

•

'Stefan bled and bled,' Pyke went on and Eve felt nauseous. How could a man do that to a child? 'But Augustus didn't care. He tossed the severed flesh into the wastepaper bin and left the room as though anything else that happened was nothing to do with him.'

Pyke stretched his left leg and forcefully rubbed his thigh as if to encourage circulation.

'Magda did her best to save the boy, but the bleeding just wouldn't stop. In his pain, Augustus had cut away too much of the penis itself, not just the foreskin.'

He sighed as though there were some regret over what had occurred, but Eve was soon to realize it wasn't because of the harm done to poor young Stefan.

'All that followed was because of the Jewish boy.' Pyke scowled with resentment, as if events might have turned out otherwise but for the bodged 'operation'. 'Magda ordered me to bring towels, and then more towels, but nothing could staunch that bleeding. The boy was draining of colour before our eyes because of blood loss. Naturally, taking him to a hospital or calling a doctor wasn't an option; how could we have explained the injury? No doubt Augustus would have been imprisoned for what he had done and Magda too, probably, for being an accomplice. I didn't care for my own chances either: they had special places for naughty boys in those days. All the other children would have ganged up on me, they would have told the police what a bad person I'd been. They never liked me.'

Eve could hardly believe what she was hearing. Pyke was now wallowing in self-pity. But while he was preoccupied she took a sly glance up the stairway behind her. If she and Loren could only reach Cally's bedroom there might be a chance to barricade themselves in…

Light in the vast room dipped and she wondered if the generator in the basement could take the strain of running all the electrics in Crickley Hall. Perhaps Gabe hadn't done such a good job on it after all, and if the lights went out once more, it might give them another opportunity to get away from Pyke. But then the lights came up again, although their glow was weaker than before.

In the darker regions of the hall there seemed to be a slight movement, lighter shadows shifting inside the darker shadows again. The air was heavy, oppressive, the kind of heaviness that usually came before an electrical storm. The fine hairs on Eve's arms bristled and there was an uncomfortable creeping sensation along her spine, the arctic breath of ungovernable fear. Oddly, although the source of light came from high above—the iron chandelier and the landing light—it was much darker round the ceiling, as if a blackness were hanging there, a kind of murky fog that was pressing down on the room below.

Pyke appeared not to have noticed, or if he did, he was ignoring it. Rain rattled the tall window.

He began to speak again, revisiting a past that was obviously important to him. 'Magda knew we couldn't save the boy, although by God, she did try. Stefan was fading away fast and she realized what we had to do. We had used the well to get rid of the teacher's body before; we could use it again.'