The Secret of Crickley Hall

Swish-thwack!

Pausing a few moments as though the wielder of the stick is looking into doors along the landing.

Lili now sees and hears everything through the eyes and ears of one of the children hidden in the darkness…

… Footsteps approach, softly because the predator wears no shoes, coming closer, the children afraid to breathe, every few seconds the cane making the sharp thwacking sound they know so well The light footsteps stop.

He is outside the cupboard door.

All three shriek as the door suddenly swings open. They dig their heels into the floorboards as they try to push themselves as far back into the cupboard as possible. Gerald is now wailing and Brenda is shouting, 'Get away! Get away!' They hunch their shoulders and press their foreheads against their bent knees, and they refuse to see the naked man who is leaning through the open door, the long, thin stick with the splayed end in his hand.

One by one Cribben draws them out and one by one he murders them. He strangles the boy and snaps the neck of the little girl. Brenda is last, and he grabs her ankle and yanks hard so that she slides out onto the landing. This girl's struggling body is held off the floor by her neck, as was Susan Trainer's only minutes before, and her feet kick out at him uselessly. But he doesn't feel the blows; nothing could detract from the pain inside his head. He squeezes, tighter and tighter, and Brenda's frightened, despairing eyes almost pop out of their sockets with the pressure, and her tongue, its tip trapped by her lower teeth, curls over to bulge from her mouth.

Like her young friend Susan, Brenda involuntarily urinates, and its stream spatters Cribben's legs and feet. He takes no notice. His only purpose is to extinguish the lives of these disloyal and ill-behaved miscreants who had been given into his care. Nothing else matters.

… And in her psychic vision, the unconscious Lili Peel was held aloft and was slowly being strangled. Her own legs jerked in the mud and grass on which she lay, and her eyeballs pushed against their lids, her tongue began to emerge from her mouth, as if she herself suffered the young girl's imminent death. She started to panic, needing air, the hands that squeezed her neck so strong and relentless. But as life passed from the last child, so Lili escaped her corpse. Still senseless yet still 'sensing', Lili's vision continued…

Cribben allows the child's lifeless body to fall on the floor. He retrieves the punishment cane that is lying on the landing. He stands still. Something is not quite right, but the torturous pounding inside his head will not allow clear thought. Has he dealt with all the children? He isn't sure, he cannot think.

It suddenly comes to him, though. Eleven evacuees had been sent to Crickley Hall, but despite his blinding pain he knows he has despatched only nine. Then he remembers Stefan Rosenbaum—the Jew!—has already been accounted for. That meant one was missing.

Where was the eleventh child?

Cribben resumes his search…

And Lili lost the psychic nightmare, although not for long.

73: INSANITY

Eve drew up her legs, resting the flat of her foot on the small square landing at the turn of the staircase, ready to use the leverage to push herself up. She still didn't know Pyke's intentions, but there was no doubt that they were bad as far as she and Loren were concerned. And every instinct as a mother told her they would be particularly bad for Loren. As he talked, Pyke kept looking at her daughter, showing more interest in her than Eve. If she could keep him talking, they might get a chance to escape. Or Lili might possibly get back with help.

He looked up at the window as stuttering lightning bleached all its glass white again. He waited for the thunder to die away before he spoke.

'So what did Augustus Cribben want from me?' The question was put mildly enough and Eve was aware that it was rhetorical. 'What caused him to reach out from his grave to me? If I were psychic I might have known long ago. If Augustus's spectre were stronger, he might have been able to communicate his needs to me.'

Pyke's smile was bitter.

'It was only comparatively recently that I found the answer,' he said. 'God only knows why I hadn't done it long ago—at least I would have the reason for the hauntings that have affected my state of mind all these years.'

Let him talk, Eve advised herself. Pretend interest and let him ramble. She exerted pressure on Loren's shoulder to warn her she was going to make a move soon, and was reassured when her daughter pressed a hand against Eve's back as if to say she would be ready. Pyke's lengthy narrative had allowed Loren to get over her initial panic, although she was still rigid with fear.

Eve continued to force herself to be polite and rational. 'Why does there have to be an explanation for Augustus Cribben to haunt you? Doesn't that sort of thing just happen?'

'No, dear woman, it does not just 'happen',' he chided her. 'There are always reasons for hauntings. Some people may bear a grudge when they pass over and their spirit returns for revenge. Or the deaths might have been so traumatic that the spirit does not even realize he or she is dead. Sometimes there is some unfinished business or other left behind that has to be resolved. The last of these applies to Augustus Cribben.'

Pyke frowned as though the thought disturbed him more than he could say.

'You see, Eve, Augustus had eleven evacuees in his charge here at Crickley Hall.' He emphasized the number again. 'Eleven children. That last night he'd punished only nine, all slain by his own hands. He knew the Jewish boy, Stefan, had died earlier, his body despatched by myself and Magda, but it still meant only ten children—his children—were dead. So where was the final one, the eleventh child?'

He had posed the question as though expecting an answer from Eve. When she didn't respond he seemed disappointed. Pyke continued.

'Of course, I was the eleventh evacuee in his care. Maurice Stafford, my name then, was the missing child. Augustus wasn't aware I'd run away with Magda, with me in fear for my life and Magda in fear for her future. Who knows? He was so uncontrolled he might even have killed his own sister.'

Pyke breathed out a long sigh of resignation. 'Augustus wanted to claim all the children. That was his right, they had been given to him.'

Eve discreetly rose on an elbow, very slowly so that Pyke would not notice. An awful suspicion was beginning to dawn on her.

'I only understood this,' he went on, 'when I went through the journals of that period in a public library. October 1943. The Hollow Bay flood made all the front pages, even though there was a war going on. After all, sixty-eight people were drowned or crushed to death in the disaster and the village was almost destroyed. Even more poignantly, so the newspapers pointed out, eleven of those who died that night were orphans who had been evacuated from London for their own safety. Eleven children who were in the care of Augustus Cribben.'

Pyke nodded to himself. 'There was the answer for me, laid out in stark black and white print on the front page of the national dailies. Such tragic irony. Children sent to the safety of the country because London in wartime was too dangerous.

'Two of the evacuees' bodies were never recovered and it was assumed they had been swept out to sea by the river that runs beneath the house. After all, the rest of the orphans' bodies had been discovered in the cellar where there was a well to the underground river, so the assumption was natural enough. No one knew that Stefan's body had been dumped in the well on another day, and I, of course, had absconded to London.'

Eve and Loren were almost sitting erect on the stairway by now and Eve's dread was deepening. She forced herself to speak normally. 'I still don't understand what this has to do with us.' She said this despite her suspicion.

He took a sudden step towards them and stamped his walking stick on the bare boards of the small landing. Both of them flinched.

'Don't you see?' he said excitedly. 'Isn't it clear to you after all I've said? The eleventh child doesn't have to be me: it can be another child!'