Property of a Lady(55)

What’s interesting on a purely local level is that a seventeenth century source states a charect can be used as a defence against: “Witchcraft, evil Tongues, and all efforts of the Devil or his Agents who walk the world seeking prey.” Is that why Charect House was so named? It wasn’t always called Charect – I discovered that early on. Its original name was Mallow House. That’s a lovely name for a house – it’s a deep purple name, redolent of scented summer nights with pale lilac flares in the dusk . . . There was a mallow at the house – I remember seeing it. But the house’s name was changed in 1890 – one of the older attendants in Brank says her father told her how the name was changed to give the house protection from what walked there.

“Did it work?”

“They say not. They say whatever haunted that house, still does.”

It does, of course. I was haunted, that night. And I think that whatever haunted me is still there.’

A log broke apart in the fire, making Nell jump. She watched the cascade of sparks die away before returning to the printed page. Could it really be Alice who had written all this? The style was very similar to that of the journal Nell had found.

But I won’t cheat and turn to the end though, she thought. I’ll read properly and objectively, all the way through.

‘I always believed the real haunting started when I set the old clock going. I do know that sounds peculiar, but it’s how it seemed at the time, and the years have done nothing to alter my opinion.

It was shortly before two a.m. when I saw the figure at the top of the stairs in Charect House. At first I tried to pretend it was simply the huge damp stain on the wall, but deep down I knew it was not. I can still remember how I ran back into the library and slammed the door, my heart pounding so hard that I’m surprised I didn’t drop down dead of a heart attack there and then.

I sat in the library for a long time, huddled into a corner of the window seat, trying to summon up the courage to go back out to the hall. All around me the house was silent, but every so often a tiny creak sounded in the hall, and I knew he was out there. Do ghosts walk? I don’t mean in the haunting sense, I mean really physically walk across a floor, causing worn floorboards to creak? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, but I know that on that night something walked across the old floors of Charect House, and it didn’t do so silently.

The grisly old clock chimed two a.m. as I crouched there irresolute. (Me, irresolute! Never before, and I hope never again.) I hated the sound of that clock: it was distorted and uneven, as if it was struggling to make itself heard from beneath a murky lake. When I remember that night, the sound of that clock ticks and chimes slyly through the memories. I waited for the faint reverberations to die away, and that was when I heard the other sound. Not soft, stealthy footsteps this time, but something quite different. Somewhere in the house, something was tapping on a wall.

It’s extraordinary how chilling it was. For a moment I thought it was part of the knocking I had heard earlier – the knocking he had made on the window and the door, asking to be let in – but I knew almost in the same instant that it was not. This was a light, panic-filled tapping – a trapped-bird sound. Except that whatever was making it was certainly not a bird.

That was the point at which I knew I should have to go out into the hall. I would have to see if I could capture that figure on film and those tapping sounds on the tape recorder. I buoyed myself up by thinking about the paper I would write afterwards for the Society for Psychic Research, and how people would say, “Goodness, imagine that sensible Alice Wilson – lifelong disbeliever and cynic! – writing such an account.” Perhaps some of them might even say that it must have been a remarkably convincing encounter to affect me so strongly, and speculate as to the truth of it.

I set off up the stairs, the camera around my neck, the heavy-based torch grasped firmly in my right hand. For a relieved moment I thought he had gone, then I saw he was still there, turning his head this way and that, as if searching for something.

I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t operate the camera shutter, but as I tried to force my hands to behave calmly, he began to sing, very softly:

“Sever quickly the dead man’s fist—

Climb who dare where he swings in the air,

And pluck five locks of the dead man’s hair.

Then twist into wicks,

With the grease and the fat,

One on the thumb and each finger to fix.”


All ideas of using the camera fled, and I began to back away. As if the movement was a cue for which he had been waiting, he began to descend the stairs. He came slowly and warily, lifting one hand aloft, in the way people used to lift an oil lamp aloft. But it was not a lamp he carried.

Dear God, I can’t believe I’m writing this, and I certainly don’t expect many people to believe it, but—

In his hand he clutched a second hand – a dreadful, misshapen dead hand, with glimmers of light oozing greasily from each fingertip.

The hand taken at the midnight hour from the gallows tree.

For the second time that night I ran away. This time I didn’t run into the library though – I wasn’t going to risk being trapped in there – I ran along the passage leading to the kitchens. My feet rang out eerily on the stone-flagged floor, but I reached the main scullery safely and tumbled inside, dragging the door shut. It was dark, but it was not absolutely pitch black: moonlight trickled in from the small, grimed windows.