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.
Maurice Stafford, who had not forgotten his name or how he had returned to London, nor the horror he had left behind in Crickley Hall, was renamed Gordon Pyke.
The Pykes were gloriously happy with their new-found son, who hobbled around on crutches while his injured leg strengthened, and the boy did his best to conceal the unpleasant side of his nature, a task that was not difficult for him over the first few months. But then the nightmares had begun, prompted, he had always felt, by the fresh attacks on the city, this time pilotless rockets sent over from the coasts of Europe by the desperate Germans. The doodlebugs, as the first V-1 rockets were nicknamed, brought hell back to the capital. The drone of their engines was feared, but the silence when the engines cut out and the flying bombs dropped through the sky were feared even more.
Henry Pyke was killed while on duty in a school hall acquisitioned by the ARP when a doodlebug fell on it and completely destroyed the building. Seven other people lost their lives with him.
The nightmares that came to plague young Gordon Pyke were intense and damaging. They made his nerves bad; they made him neurotic and paranoid.
These terrible dreams varied in content but were constant over the years. In one (the first one he had), he is on a train and he can see Magda Cribben's white face outside the window. Her mouth is open but he can't hear her shouts. Her pale fingers claw at the glass as the train begins to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed, leaving Magda behind, her face ugly in its contortions. He is always struck by an acute loneliness as the train leaves the woman far behind. In another, he is standing at the foot of the stairs in Crickley Hall and all the other orphans who had been evacuated with him are higher up, each to a step, and he feels deep shame as they stare down at him, for he knows they are all dead. When they beckon him, silently inviting him to join them on the stairs, he doesn't move. He can't, he's paralysed. So the dead start to come down to him and he can see the emptiness in their eyes, the lifelessness of their corpses; he can smell their decay. In yet another, he is flagellating Augustus Cribben's nude body with a bamboo cane, and as he does so, the skin parts, wounds open, Cribben's abused body becomes raw red meat and no longer recognizable as human. But he can't stop the flogging, he wields the cane until the meat begins to pulp, then disintegrate, and the gore puddles at the feet of the thing that is no longer a man but now a mashed carcass that starts to corrupt and rot and fall away until finally it is nothing more than boneless lumps of flesh in the spreading pool of blood. Even then he cannot stop; he continues to thrash the bloody mounds, and the cane itself becomes red and slippery until it slides from his hand and he falls to his knees in the muck he has created. He always woke up at that point, shivering yet sweaty, clammy, peering round frantically, searching for anything lurking in the darkness of his bedroom. The final nightmare in the cycle of four has him up to his neck in cold water that is as black as the space around him. A circle of dull grey light comes from high above, and when he feels the slimy walls they are circular. Naturally he is frightened in this predicament, but the real fear comes when he realizes there is something in the inky water with him. He can't see it, but he can sense it. As something brittle, like the decayed fingers of a claw, wraps itself round his wrist he starts to scream and it becomes a real, waking scream that seems to rebound off the walls of his room.
Yes, the dreams were bad, for their consistency as much as their nature, but it was the second appearance of the ghost that had him gibbering on the floor of his bedroom, his curled body pushed tightly into a corner, his hand scratching frantically at the wallpaper and his teeth chattering, his eyes bulging.
It was late at night and he was lying in bed, just beginning to doze, hoping that his sleep would be dreamless, when he heard the familiar sound.
He was afraid to open his eyes, but also afraid not to. He could feel the room had become icy and the air was foul, as if a large rat lay dead and mouldering beneath the floorboards.
He forced his eyes open.
Because of his nightmares, he always slept with the ceiling light on, so anything in the room was plainly visible. Only too visible. The figure of Augustus Cribben was coming slowly towards the bed, and this time it was not transparent, it was as firm and solid as when Cribben was alive. Only twin gleams of light could be seen of the shadowed eyes, but the lips plainly moved as if the vision was speaking.
It had to be a ghost, but it looked so real!
The cane came down hard on the bedspread and, impossibly, he saw dust rise from the material. The cane came down again and this time it hit his leg, the one that had been broken by his fall into the cellar, and although the pain was mostly absorbed by the cover, it was still strong enough to release the scream that had struggled to
