A Chaser Of Ghosts

 

At about 13,000 words, this is not strictly a short story. It was inspired by a visit, in 1995, to a Derbyshire landmark. My visit was brief, nothing happened and no one else was there. Still, it made an impression.

 

Note: although 'Scarston' and 'Jessopville' are re-imaginings of real places - and Pentrich is a real place - the characters and events described in the story are all totally fictitious.

 

The narrator arrives at a ruined mansion to find out more about the ghost which haunts it . . .

 

 

There it was, the haunt of the Grey Lady, a black box staring out from the crest of a green hill. I glimpsed it from the thundering motorway in the valley below, just where it bridged an insignificant stream. And then, as I sped into a cutting - the sliced-off tail of the hill - it was gone.

 

* * ² * *

 

Oh we happy cyborg supertravellers!

 

Once we could only know our country through stories or pictures - and always separated by blank regions we could only guess at. Today, in our spark-fuelled metal jackets, we can comfortably see everything of England in one lifetime.

 

The government has given official recognition to all our landscapes. It has recorded their geology and landforms, documented their fields, woods and farms, and logged their patterns of archaeology, settlement and industry. It has acknowledged the deep time it took to build their rock foundations and the millennia of backbreaking work by innumerable unknown lives – their existence presumed out of logical necessity – that smeared on those characteristic shapes and colours. It has published thousands of words on each. But still we speed across them in minutes, passing indifferently between them.

 

* * ³ * *

 

I left the motorway and followed the road past a flat metallic building with the logo of a former occupant shadow-printed on its side; this was obscured by a sign announcing the premises were ‘Under Offer,’ but the word ‘photographics’ stood out crisply. Beyond was a hard red-brick grid of terraced and semi-detached houses, built for miners in decades past when miners were wanted.

 

I turned off the main road to wind my way between vast fields of antiseptic green, a grassy cloak torn at one point to reveal coal dust. The grey stone of Scarston, a picturesque memento of the pre-industrial, hemmed the lane as it neared its end. After the last house, the lane bled out into a small car park over which loomed the west side of Scarston Hall - two projecting wings hugging a courtyard, all dirt-brown stucco. Unroofed, windowless, every doorway unguarded, daylight poured in from above and around. The walls had a freakish appearance, like giant slabs of fungus sprouting from the remains of something long buried.

 

* * ⁴ * *

 

I am here because of a photograph. One evening after work, to smother a few hours of pestering blankness, I’d gone to the public library. Skimming an old gazetteer, I noticed a grainy monochrome of the east front of Scarston Hall. It was not grand or imposing, but its classical elegance - the gracious geometry and faultless embellishments of its fluted Corinthian columns and pilasters, its pediments and balustrades - held my attention long enough to see a dense shrubbery through the lower window casements. The branches of a young tree thrust out the doorway, and ivy spewed out from one of the upper windows Green Man-style. The lawn in front was a mass of nettles.

 

“Shifting industrial fortunes over the years have bequeathed tracts of dereliction throughout the county,” the gazetteer read. “But none is more beautifully screened than this.” It noted that the ruin was haunted by a Grey Lady. That was all it said: Grey Lady, capital G, capital L, as if she were a standard feature in such places and no elaboration was needed.

 

I was intrigued enough to locate Scarston Hall on a Landranger map of the area: it sits on a hill, a field or two from, and in full view of, the M1. It must be the most visible haunted house in England. A hundred thousand vehicles a day bellowing past while the Grey Lady quietly manifests and fades in cycles she does not know.

 

It gnawed at me, this strange trinity - the shell of an old mansion, a motorway pounding with ruthless cyborg life, and an enigmatic spirit. I had the idea that such conjunctions are the essence of England and, hungering for knowledge and activity, decided I would visit some of them and write down my thoughts and experiences. Perhaps something would come of it. The obvious problem with this first tableau was the Grey Lady: who was she? What distress had so consumed her life that it had outlasted it, imprinting itself on her surroundings? Grief of some kind maybe? A husband killed in war, a son shipwrecked? The private anguish behind a public event: that would work.

 

* * ⁵ * *

 

There were two other cars in the car park: near the gate a Rover 200, circled to face outwards by someone preparing, as they arrived, for departure; and in a far corner, under the spread of a horse-chestnut, a Saab sedan. The lawn was trimmed and soft. I stepped onto it and walked along the spare, unadorned north front. I observed that whatever jungle had once flourished within the walls was gone.

 

Ahead was a man with a camera, mounted on a tripod to face the east front. I skewed off to the left to get out of his field of view; he nodded appreciatively, smoothing back sparse hair. I drifted down the slope to a crumbling garden wall, beyond which was farmland, below that the motorway. Traffic in both directions was crawling at a snail’s pace: an odd carnival that only I had come to watch.

 

Finally I turned to face the east front, to see the Scarston Hall I thought I knew. Its sandstone facade wasn’t black at all, but a tepid bronze. And with no foliage inside, just space and scoured walls, it seemed insubstantial, like a film-set.

 

“Magnificent, isn’t it!” the man called out.

 

“Fantastic, yes . . . Do you know much about it?” I asked, approaching.

 

“Used to come here a lot years ago,” he replied, lifting his camera and laying it in its case. “Thought I knew it, but I had no idea! Divine proportions! Hah!”

 

The man was eager to talk. He said he was researching a book on the Golden Ratio in Georgian architecture.

 

“Golden Ratio? It's a set of proportions the Greeks found was the most pleasing in art and architecture. The Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens? Golden Ratio! The ratio of the smaller to the larger is the ratio of the larger to the whole. Zero point six one eight ad infinitum. But what the Greeks didn’t know, what we’ve only discovered recently, is how often it pops up in nature. Sunflowers, pineapples, the way plants grow. Shells, antlers, the flight of a peregrine hunting. The proportions in our bodies, in the most beautiful faces.”

 

“What, so it’s like a beautiful face?”

 

“Look at the pavilions, the ratio of the height of the windows on the second floor to the height of the doorcases below. Look at the pediment, the ratio of the height of the tympanum to height of the tympanum and entablature combined. Hah! Both Golden Ratios. Look at the length of the central seven bays, between the pavilions, to the length of the whole façade. Golden Ratio again. And the most wonderful thing is, it’s on a hill! Not as dramatic as the Acropolis, but enough to inspire anyone down there on the M1.”

 

“It all sounds really interesting. So when will your book be out?”

 

“Couldn't tell you,” he said, detaching a ball head from the tripod. “I’ve published three books already. The one I thought would take a year took five. And the time I expected to be working on one for three years, I’d said all I could in eight months!”

 

“Your publisher must be very understanding.”

 

“Publisher? Hah! No, I publish them myself. I don’t want deadlines, I don’t want reviews. I’m writing for myself. I enjoy the process – the research, the laying out of everything, constructing the argument. With so much to see, so much to record, it might be a long time.”

 

“. . . I’m doing some research on the Hall myself actually. Ghost stories, that sort of thing. Don’t suppose you’ve come across anything? I did hear about a Grey Lady but . . .”

 

“I hope not!” said the man. He closed and folded his tripod with sharp precision. “We’re in the Age of Reason here. Order, empiricism, decorum! A ghost would be a contradiction! Anyway, nice to make your acquaintance but I’ve got to rush off. Meeting someone in Derby! There’s an old school there he tells me I absolutely must see!”

 

And like a whirlwind he tore up the slope with his equipment and vanished, leaving a strange silence. I drifted back to the car park, briefly raising my eyes to face the Hall again: nothing.

 

* * ⁶ * *

 

The Saab was gone but the Rover still held to its launch pad by the gate. Beside Scarston Hall's south front is a small church that was already centuries old when the Hall was built. Perhaps it was open: I should have a look. I cut through a little churchyard with uneven ranks of headstones. I tried the door; it gave easily. Inside was cold and sparse: white-painted stone that had lost its whiteness, dried-up wooden benches and panels, and not a flake of stained glass in the windows.

 

“Afternoon!” came a voice.

 

“Ah, hi,” I returned to the grey-haired, grey-suited vicar camouflaged in a row of columns on the opposite side of the nave.

 

“You're lucky to find us open,” he said genially, approaching with a pile of hymn books. “There's only one service a month here now. It's this Sunday, so I've got a few things to sort out!”

 

“Do you mind if I have a look around?”

 

“No, please do, only I'll have to lock up and go soon.”

 

I wandered up the south aisle, took a few steps into the chancel, and came back down the north aisle. There were a few memorials and an embellished marble tomb. Nothing caught my attention.

 

“Very nice,” I nodded as I approached the door, where the vicar was waiting. “Do you know much about the history of Scarston Hall?”

 

He’d only been in the area five years, he said. But he’d picked up various bits and pieces in that time, which he began to regurgitate for my benefit.

 

“I read somewhere the Hall was haunted,” I put in. “A Grey Lady. Do you know anything about her?”

 

“A Grey Lady? Not heard that one. Most people say the ghost is an old gardener, a Mr Roberts. He worked at the Hall 'til the thirties when the Jessops finally abandoned the place. They say for years afterwards he would keep the lawn cut, just so he could walk his dog there in the evenings. It must have grieved him to see the Hall go to rack and ruin. Anyway, he died - the fifties sometime. The older villagers will tell you that the dog would sit on his grave, out in the churchyard here. And some of them will swear they saw Mr Roberts too, on the steps at the east front, while his dog chased up and down as if he'd been thrown a stick. Anyway, there was a particularly bad winter one year, and they’ve never been seen since.”

 

“Mmm . . . and you've not heard anything about a Grey Lady? Do you know why the Jessops abandoned it?”

 

“I’m told that, in those days, the valley was full of coal pits and waste heaps. I don't think they liked looking at them . . . What's your particular interest in the ghost, if you don’t mind me asking?”

 

“Oh, just the story: I don't believe in life after death or anything like that . . . don't get me wrong: I did use to believe in God. I used to be quite religious actually.” As a teenager, I had often tried to imagine what God saw when he looked at me. I would play his thoughts in my head, run them over, until I was satisfied he knew how much I deserved from him.

 

“The world really tries our faith sometimes," mused the vicar. "Well if you want to speak to one of the older villagers, you couldn’t do much better than Mrs Wickes. She’s lived here all her life; 89 she is – but don’t go telling her I told you! She’s a fount of all knowledge about Scarston as it was; she’ll know all the ghost stories. You’ll find her here every morning: eight o’clock sharp. She’s usually around for a couple of hours - dusting, sweeping, tidying, just keeping everything in order really.”

 

* * ⁷ * *

 

As I approached my car, I was impressed by its gleaming metallic navy. But something was needling me. And there it was: a broken beer bottle lying centimetres from my rear wheel. The largest fragment had retained most of its curvature, and lay on the ground like a malicious crab with pincers raised. With my foot I scraped the bigger pieces away to the side. The crab stared me out with a two-fingered rebuke. Fucking moron, I thought, as I turned the ignition and steered my way out between the gateposts.

 

I wished I'd been able to explain things to that vicar. The problem was, my loss of belief had not come from a single event or moment of revelation, so there was no story I could use to justify myself. There had been a few crystallising experiences I suppose, but they were all quite banal. Like that time I was in the back seat of my parents’ car. We were driving through an overspill town on the edge of the city I’d grown up in. This place had a terrible reputation: the local news had just covered someone being doused in petrol there and set alight - the police said it was a case of mistaken identity. I watched as we passed smashed-up houses, graffiti on every wall, bars on the shop windows, rubbish everywhere. I heard my mother say how awful it was, how it was all farmland when she was young, and how they built it to get people out of slums and give them good houses with plenty of greenery. ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions!’ had been my father’s response.

 

In the middle of all that squalor had been a house with pink roses climbing up its front wall on a trellis and a neat privet hedge round the garden. Everything was so beautifully manicured. Overwhelmed by its surroundings but striking out from them - a metaphor worthy of Pilgrim’s Progress. It could have gone either way. But for me, the backdrop, the scenery, have always been centre-stage. And once my outlook had settled, the world became like a cube drawn on paper: you may think you see it from above, or from below, but whichever it is, it takes an effort of will to see the opposite, and when you do, it appears incongruous, a piece of trickery.

 

* * ⁸ * *

 

The stone-faced Victorian villa where I was staying was close to the centre of an ancient town set on a bluff across the valley from Scarston. Before my evening meal, I went for a wander around it. There was a castle which had been an opulent playground in times past, but with its coal-mining staple gone, it didn’t look like the town was spending much on anything these days. I stood in the market square. There was no one about except for a man of uncertain age with soot-black hair and brown leather skin covered in tattoos: “A’right Cock!” he greeted me as he limped by.

 

I was the only guest at my B&B that night, so the guest lounge felt even more desolate than it looked. There was a pile of magazines on a side table, including an issue of a pop psychology monthly. It featured a scientist who took a load of students who’d never heard of Mondrian – the artist renowned for paintings of straight lines and coloured rectangles - and showed them pictures by him alongside computer-generated fakes. He asked them to guess which ones were real, and most of the time they guessed right. The article speculated that Mondrian had used Golden Ratios in his work and that the test subjects had reacted subconsciously to this. I thought of that man with his camera: “Hah!”

 

I was already tired, but waited for the juke box in a pub down the street to hush before I turned in. The room was hot, so I opened the window. Cars droned by. Somebody started singing - a croaky howl – but his high spirits didn’t last. A car alarm rang out. It shut off, then sounded again briefly. Things quietened after that, but I spent a long time waiting for sleep. I shifted around a few times to find a more comfortable position. Eventually, I lay back and forgot that I was awake . . .

 

. . . I was heavy as a corpse: heavier, like I was being pressed down, being absorbed into the bed. Did I lock the door to my room? The question consumed me: did I lock the door? Someone was there, watching me. I heard him breathing. Did I lock the door? The breathing was close now, in my face. There was a hand on my chest. I struggled to stir my limbs, shake my head, cry out. Nothing: I was trapped. Panic roused me and blind with terror I clawed through the paralysis and broke out with a yelp . . .

 

The fear melted away. I turned, sighing, and pulled the sheet to my ears. I should've been prepared, I thought, seen though the illusion. Why did I fall for it every time? Every time, certain that someone was leaning over me, waiting.

 

After that, I slept soundly.

 

* * ⁹ * *

 

“Morning!” greeted my hostess chirpily.

 

Only one of the tables in the dining room had been set - the one with the best view of the TV. The news was on a loop, repeating ‘library pictures’ of a man walking down a street. He was the main story: a Tory MP who had just defected to Labour. The forecast was for a clear, crisp, beautiful September day.

 

“Did you sleep well?” she asked, bringing a pot of coffee. I said I had. I told her about my sleep paralysis episode. How could she not be fascinated? Waking up in dreaming sleep, to feel the muscle immobilisation that is nature’s way of stopping you acting out your dreams. Discovering your body has another life it has been hiding from you.

 

But my hostess misunderstood me. “No one’s ever mentioned that before,” she said. “In fact they’ve always said what a comfortable room it is.”

 

Not something for the Visitors Book then.

 

* * ¹⁰ * *

 

Mrs Wickes mustn’t have stayed long that morning, because when I arrived at Scarston church (comfortably inside the time margin given by the vicar) it was locked. I thumped on the door a couple of times. I even called out her name. But there was no one around. I went on past the tower and onto the lawn. The air was fresh, chilly even. I gazed down at the motorway for a few seconds; it spoke with a throaty hiss, like waves retreating forever down a shingle beach.

 

I entered Scarston Hall by the east front. The ground inside had been covered with gravel, now bearing a green algal tinge and showing, in a few hollows, the muddy stains of the underlying earth. The walls were ugly: scraped, scratched and scarred. There were gaps in the plaster revealing brick beneath, sooty blotches commemorating vanished fireplaces, and indecipherable remnants of the plaster mouldings shaped by Italian craftsmen.

 

“If you want to know how it used to look, you have to go to America.” I jumped, and turned to see a white beard approaching, a rotund and rather landlocked Captain Birdseye. “The plaster in this room was taken down and shipped there years ago: a museum in Boston. There’s a woman in the village says they've reassembled it just like it was when she was a girl!”

 

“Is that Mrs Wickes by any chance?” It was. I explained I was looking for her, and why.

 

“A Grey Lady?” He stroked his cheek. “Mmm . . . Beth’d be the one to ask though: Beth Wickes.” A dark brown Labrador, stocky and short-legged, plodded languidly up to us. With its belly sagging, head fallen and tongue spilling out, it looked a pathetic creature. I could hear its breath, a snuffling moaning sound. The Captain acknowledged it with a glance. “You’d need to be here at eight if you want to catch her. You can set your watch by her in fact. But she wouldn’t stay more than an hour. The church isn’t much used now and she’s quite frail. If it wasn’t a Thursday I’d take you round, but she goes out with the Darby and Joan club Thursday mornings.”

 

“. . .”

 

“But why don’t you go round and see her later? One, Hall Close . . . I think I can tell you that, you seem like a serious bloke. I’ll be checking up on her this afternoon anyway. Shall I tell her to expect you?”

 

* * ¹¹ * *

 

In the local history section of the County Library, I checked out all the references to Scarston Hall I could find. I became saturated with names and dates, read accounts of money made in coal mines and spent on travels abroad, of family feuds and loves at first sight. I saw copies of portraits of diverse Scarstons, their faces fleshy and insipid. But there was no mention of any ghosts.

 

I approached one of the staff. He was thirtyish, mod-style black hair flat like it was drenched, wearing a tweed jacket. “I'm doing some research on Scarston Hall,” I told him. “Myths and legends about it, how they started.”

 

“Have you checked out the supernaturals?”

 

“I’m particularly interested in a ghost, a Grey Lady . . .”

 

“I heard a story once: the first Lord Scarston running into debt while he was building the Hall? Do you know it? His creditors tried to stop him, cut their losses. But he was in love with the place, threatened to shoot any of them that came near. On the day it was finished, they showed up armed. He ran at them screaming, pistol in hand. Someone fired a shot and all hell was let loose. There’s bullet holes in the stone apparently. And they say he still roams the Hall, ready for anyone who tries to take it off him. . . . No?”

 

The librarian led me on a zig-zag course to a rack in a far corner: “Right, these are the supernaturals. Ah . . .” He plucked out a thin hardback entitled 'Haunted Derbyshire,' handed it to me, and was gone.

 

I skimmed the book, and a few others. I remember an ironic account of a haunting at another hall by Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher who, in his lifetime, had ridiculed belief in ghosts. As for Scarston Hall, it didn't get a footnote.

 

* * ¹² * *

 

I had lunch in a pub down the street from the County Library. After eating, I sat staring into space, not sure what to do next, when that librarian appeared holding a half-finished pint: “Mind if I join you?”

 

“Oh, yes, do,” I replied, instinctively polite.

 

"It's not every day you meet someone interested in Scarston Hall," he said, pulling up a stool. “So have you found your ghosts?”

 

"No, I saw something a few months ago about a Grey Lady there. No details or anything. I was just curious what the story was.”

 

“Make up a story and tell it to a few people. It'll go round like Chinese whispers, and in a few years, come back to see how it’s grown!”

 

“You don’t believe in things like that yourself then?”

 

“Do you? No, we have ghosts for the same reason we have religion. Because life’s bloody unfair and we want reassurance that justice will be done in the end. What better than to pretend the dead are still around, waiting to get even. But imagine if it was true – you’d be saying these unfortunate people wake up after death condemned to repeat the unhappiest moments of their lives.”

 

“No one thinks that these days,” I said. “Ghosts aren’t conscious. They’re like a piece of film, a memory of the building around them.”

 

“Ah yes,” he nodded, “the so-called ‘stone tape’ theory. And you think it’s plausible that bricks and stones have memories? But if that was true, you might have a problem, because if I’m right the interior of Scarston Hall was gutted years ago and ended up in America. So if the ‘memory’ of your Grey Lady was in the plaster or panelling, either she was destroyed in the process, or you’ll have to cross the Atlantic to find her.”

 

“I don’t need to find her. I only want her story. There’s an old mansion – a shell, a lost world. The M1 – I see it as the long thin heart of England, never stops beating. And then there’s this ghost - of the past but in the present. Who was she, and why do people think she’s still there?”

 

“But why do you need a ghost story? Isn’t your ruined hall gazing down on your busy motorway a story enough in itself?”

 

“There’s more to a place than what’s visible. It has an atmosphere, a sense of history. Or it feels threatening or calming but you can’t explain it. And even what you can see affects you in ways you can’t. While I was at Scarston Hall yesterday, someone was taking photos. He said it was designed according to the Golden Ratio and that’s why it’s so beautiful.”

 

“That Golden Ratio stuff is a myth. You can pick and choose features from a building to prove any ratio you want. Did he mention the Parthenon? They always do. You’d think one of them would take the trouble to measure it.”

 

I described the Mondrian experiment I’d read about, and its results. “So maybe there is an arrangement of things that’s just ‘right.’ Something Mondrian found, or just felt, which the rest of us feel too? All I’m saying is, there’s all these experiences of a place we can’t put into words, so if you were trying to describe them to someone who hadn’t been there, you’d probably have to tell a story. And not just any story. Something mysterious, vaguely supernatural, to put those wordless feelings into words.”

 

“Okay but you should still make up your own. Other people’s stories are Trojan horses, smuggling all kinds of stuff into your brain.” The librarian leaned back and brought a leg up, ankle resting on knee. “We had a picture above the fireplace when I was a kid – a painting being a visual story. It was a typical English scene: a woman and some children in billowing Edwardian costumes walking barefoot up a steep hill and behind them was this beautiful valley, trees and hedges as far as you could see, the odd thatched cottage, and a river, snaking away in the distance. I had really bad earache once. I’d exhausted myself crying about it and fallen asleep on the couch. And when I woke, the fire was lit, the pain was gone and in my drowsy state I looked up at that picture. Before, I’d only seen details – the woman’s hat, petals in the field, the silver line of the river at the top. This time I saw it whole, a real place where I might go and find those people, still climbing that hill. I had a complete vision of England, before I’d seen any of it. And when I’m in the countryside now, it’s that picture I’m looking for, and if I don’t find it, I think I’ve lost something. The truth is I never had it. I’d been hoodwinked by a con-artist, thinking I owned a landscape without owning any of the land.”

 

“That isn’t a story: you do own it – by association. England labels us. It’s how we’re seen and judged out there in the world. How we see and judge ourselves. If I find something in it that moves me – it could be a place or a landscape, it could be someone I admire – I’m buoyed up. I feel I have more, I am more.”

 

“Don’t get sold on reflected glory – it’s a sham, how we’re made into useful idiots. Let your dreams trouble you, that’s what I say. It’s hard enough following them, let alone achieving them. But if you let them bother you, and stay away from the glare of reflected glory, out of desperation you might actually do something.”

 

“. . . That story you told me, about the first Lord Scarston. Did you make it up?”

 

He laughed. “Course not! Why would you think . . . No, I overheard it, in the library - it was a few years ago, but I told you exactly what I remember. You know what, you should go to Jessopville. It was built from nothing, end of the last century, when the Jessops - the family that lived in Scarston Hall then - sunk a new coal mine. Might give you a different perspective. They’re razing it to the ground. In fact, even the ground’s being stripped away so they can get at the coal underneath. There's a new Jessopville across the road. 'The Village That Moved' they’re calling it.”

 

“. . .”

 

“And come back tomorrow night, eight o’clock. My band are gigging here. We’re trying out some new stuff, smuggled in among classic rock’n’roll numbers - Beatles, Byrds, Animals . . .”

 

“You’re a musician!”

 

“Bassist, backing vocals, fiddle if we do When I Was Young again . . . That’s right,” he said, “my ghosts are songs.”

 

* * ¹³ * *

 

Oh we happy cyborg supertravellers!

 

The countryside is flying by; you are bombarded with images, each related to but distinct from the preceding ones. It’s a visual thing, not aural. But it’s not unlike hearing an intelligible run of words, the landscape speaking to you. You filter the images, interpret them, yes - but you do the same when you listen to someone talk.

 

I drive a Toyota Corolla, ‘the world’s favourite car,’ renowned for its lack of glamour. I am a plain man, with a head too big and legs too short, yet hoping for ‘The One.’ I am an undistinguished civil servant, my career barely managed drift. But still, I am the all-seeing eye. The tree and the church spire, the isolated brick factory, the old miners’ terrace discordant with the modernisings of its inhabitants, all these may dominate wherever they can cast a shadow. But they cannot see over the hill. They cannot see their place.

 

The faster you go, the more ground you cover, the more you see, the more you know. Plunging down the motorway, a valued participant in a huge nameless project, not a human face in sight. Confident in speed, though it could kill you in a moment. A chance malfunction - an electrochemical spark – between you and death. Yet you ride on, untouchable, like a god.

 

* * ¹⁴ * *

 

And there it was, on the crest of the hill ahead: the dying embers, maroon and grey, of the old Jessopville, and the fiery oranges and yellows of the new.

 

I’d spent many contented hours as a child watching houses in my native city being demolished. The extraordinary sight and sound of walls collapsing, of chimneys toppling, of slates smashing onto rubble. The accoutrements of the most private upstairs bedroom – its wallpaper, doorways and plug sockets – exposed, suspended in the air. It’s something you don’t see nowadays, when buildings are whittled away out of sight, behind scaffolds and hoardings.

 

The road slid down to a bridge over a deep canyon between two vast craters. A pair of giant dump trucks, wheels the height of a man, passed each other in the gorge, bouncing playfully along its rugged surface. I pulled into a layby, got out my car and peered through the wire fence to see a charcoal-coloured band of rock at the base of one of the pits. I was surprised how pathetically thin it was. But that coal seam had been lying there for millennia. It was there long before there were any people, before there were any ghosts. It was there the day Scarston Hall was finished, the day its last resident departed, and the day its shell was photographed. And now we’ve hunted it down, exposed it in its subterranean hiding place, to tear it up and consume it by fire. A few minutes more of power to sustain our present in its cosy semblance of eternity.

 

I drove on to old Jessopville where I stopped and sneaked through a gap in the screen around it. It had been no more than two cramped city streets transplanted to the countryside. I made my way slowly along one of them. Apart from a house with fake stone cladding, there was a solemn uniformity to it now, a succession of doors and windows masked by blue board. A pear-shaped weight dangled from a small crane at the end while the roar of unseen machinery harassed the street's final hours. I felt an intruder, a boorish journalist at the deathbed of an old worthy. I swiftly retraced my steps, and crossed the main road into the new village.

 

I walked through the precinct of still-vacant shops that formed the centre of new Jessopville. For now, it was as lifeless as the old village. I took off down a prim cul-de-sac - also deserted, though there were curtains in every window and cars in many of the driveways. I reached the turning circle at the end, stood there for a moment, and made my way back. Out past the shops was the 'Residents Housing Office’ in a smart portacabin. I had a look at the notices lined up on a board outside, reading about a plan to create a country park on the site of old Jessopville once the coal has been removed. The surface was to be reprofiled and planted into a traditional English rural landscape of fields, hedgerows and occasional trees. There would be areas of woodland, a pond, and the opportunity to erect some memorial to the vanished colliery for which the village was built. Some of the rails which served the mine had been excavated and placed in storage for possible use in a monument.

 

Further along the road, I came to a stile. Over it led a path shaven across a field, climbing gently, straight as an arrow, to a beech copse at the crest of a hill. The contrast of its green foliage against the deep blue sky was such an enticing scene that, without hesitation, I climbed the stile and followed the path. A light breeze, the earth springy underfoot, deep breaths to fuel the exertion of a slight ascent. The trees whispered softly as I came among them, but the sylvan idyll I was expecting did not materialise. This beech cathedral had been furnished with a couple of mattresses, a settee, white kitchen panels, piles of clothes, cans, bottles and a lively range of Drive-Thru’ McTrash. The copse did not stand in the splendid isolation I’d imagined, but bordered a road, a quiet lane which never asked questions.

 

Returning to Jessopville, I went into the Housing Office to browse a display on the three house types available in the new village: the ‘Weald,’ the biggest, detached, with three bedrooms; the ‘Cotswold,’ semi-detached, with oddly small windows; and the ‘Windermere,’ a bungalow.

 

“Can I help you, m’duck?” came a voice. Sitting alone at a desk in the corner was a middle-aged woman offering a reassuring smile.

 

“No, I’m not local. I just heard about the village being moved, thought I’d have a look.”

 

“They’re lovely new houses when you consider what people had in the old village. And all green and planted round.”

 

“Yes, it’s very pleasant,” I agreed. We exchanged a few words about the area. I told her I was researching its myths and legends. I wondered how much she knew about Scarston Hall.

 

“The old ruined Hall? Not much really. We took the children there for a picnic once, years ago. It rained.”

 

“Have you heard any ghost stories about it?”

 

“Is it supposed to be haunted? Then again, these old places have to have ghosts, don’t they? Sorry, don’t know much about it. There’s some lovely walks round here though.”

 

“Yes, I’ve just been up the hill to those trees. Very nice. Shame about all the rubbish . . .”

 

“That used to be such a lovely spot. But people stopped going there after, you know, being as it was where they found Martin Stainley.”

 

“Who?”

 

The woman looked at me quizzically. “I suppose it was a long time ago - the seventies. Jack Bond dumped his body in those trees. Someone walking their dog found him. Eight years old. Same age as my two at the time.”

 

“I’m sorry I didn’t know . . . I was only a child myself then.”

 

“They say his mother didn’t know how to take it. When they told her, she showed them a new sketch pad. He was always drawing things apparently. ‘It can’t be,’ she said. ‘I’ve just bought him this.’ Very sad . . . They moved away soon after, of course.”

 

* * ¹⁵ * *

 

I drove slowly through Scarston looking for Hall Close but missed it, so I parked at the Hall and walked back into the village. It turned out to be a short alley of bungalows, all identical, with big front windows. As I came to the door of number 1, I saw a woman inside, asleep on an armchair next to an electric bar fire. Mrs Wickes I presumed: shrunken, creased and blotchy grey, I could believe she was 89. Her head had fallen across the back of the armchair, her toothless mouth lodged open. I eyed the doorbell, then looked back into her lounge, at Mrs Wickes in her warm orange repose. Should I? Could I not wait till tomorrow morning?

 

I returned to Scarston Hall, and with nothing particular to do, set off down the lawn. The air was thickening into twilight, and I stood for a while gazing at the motorway, absorbed by the glistening red and white streams of traffic in their smooth parallel beds, opposed but indifferent to each other.

 

A lamp fixed to the church wall cast a feeble golden light over the car park. As I approached my car, I noticed an unfamiliar mark along its side. My brain buzzed as I traced along the line with my fingers, dislodging tiny shreds of paint. At my rear wheel lay a two-horned fragment of glass. 'What the fuck!' The shell of Scarston Hall loomed over this scene with ridiculous self-importance.

 

Back at my B&B, I paced up and down the room. The mutilation of my car hurt as if my own skin had been gashed. The power and freedom it had given me – to travel and explore, to grease the flow of my life, to be alive. And why would anyone do that? To me? I was one of the good guys. I had come here reverently, on their side, a distant cousin come to sing all our praises. And they had broken the spell. I was on my own now.

 

I went to bed but, sour and restless, I could not let sleep in. Several times I got up and went to the window to check the yard outside, where my car shone like silver under the white light of a security lamp.

 

* * ¹⁶ * *

 

I awoke with a stiffened heart. Walking to my car in the bright morning sun, there it was: a mocking scar across its cheek. But I would not be deflected.

 

The clock on my dashboard read 8.34 as I arrived at Scarston Hall. All remnants of the broken bottle had vanished: the gesture sparked a modest thaw within me. Perhaps it was Mrs Wickes herself who had removed them. But again the church door was locked. I beat on it; no response. I started along the perimeter of the church and came to a window which was low enough - with the help of a conveniently-discarded piece of grave edging - to peer through. But the glass was frosted with dust and inside was a gloomy stillness. Well, if she does clear litter in the car park, perhaps she’s out in the grounds right now . . .

 

I took off past the tower onto the lawn and was startled by a black figure lying sideways on the grass a few metres before the east front: a young woman in a black dress with unintelligible grey swirls, and long black overcoat. Her hair was a gleaming black. Her face was elegant, with high cheek bones and a thin hooked nose, but whitened to a morbid pallor. Her lips were maroon, her eyes starkly lined and shadowed in black.

 

“Hi,” I said. “You haven’t seen Mrs Wickes by any chance?”

 

“Who?!” she replied. It sounded like a No.

 

I continued across the lawn, looking left and right earnestly on a mission that was fast becoming caricature because I wasn’t thinking about Mrs Wickes any more. I returned to the young Goth.

 

“Sorry, but . . . while I was here last night, someone vandalised my car. I was wondering . . . well, if you live round here, you might’ve seen someone?”

 

She looked at me curiously. “No,” she said. “But I’m not surprised. It’s a terrible place.”

 

“It's haunted apparently,” I said.

 

“You know about Mary Handy?”

 

“Is she the Grey Lady?” My interest was piqued now. “If you know the story, I’d be very interested to hear it!”

 

“She was no Grey Lady, only a girl. Too young to know she was just a plaything for the young Lord. Her family said she was bringing shame on them. But she thought fate was smiling on her, till she was abandoned by him too. Romeo and Juliet this wasn’t.”

 

“Wow . . .”

 

“She came here one night to plead with him. But he was drinking with his friends. The servants brought her in, out of the cold, into the cellars, and that’s where she and his child died together. The next night, he heard Mary’s screams coming up from the cellars. His servants didn’t know what he was talking about, swore to him there was no one there. Finally he went down. When he came back up, people said he looked like a ghost himself. He left Scarston that night and never returned.”

 

“That’s a damn good story,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask how you know it?”

 

“I was here in June,” she replied. “Lying where I am now. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, I was in a cold sweat. But it wasn't a dream, it didn't come from me. I saw everything out of Mary's eyes, not mine. And I saw she lived here once - and she’s still here.”

 

“. . .”

 

“She wasn’t something I’d seen on TV,” the Goth said, reading my mind. “Or out of a novel or anything like that. Mary was as real as you are, standing there. Something strange happened to me that day. But it could happen to anyone. Ghosts are everywhere, there are millions of them. Every life that’s passed through here has left a trace. Wherever we go, whatever we do, there are ghosts. And sometimes they show themselves to people who need to hear them.”

 

“So what did Mary Handy want to tell you?”

 

“She reminded me that I survived . . . I’m sorry about your car, but you should spend time with this place, let it spend time with you. Perhaps it has a message for you too. It might not be Mary; it might be a ghost that hasn't spoken before. Maybe waiting for you right now.”

 

“. . .”

 

“They’re communicating with us all the time, you know. Thoughts in your head you’d swear were your own.”

 

“Eh?”

 

“I know our bodies seem to bow down to us. But they're being ironic when they do that; they flatter to deceive.”

 

“Yes, I understand not everything we do is conscious, but surely you don’t think we’re actually possessed? That’s basically what you’re saying.”

 

“You say no,” she teased, “but not cos you know no! Only cos you don't want it! . . . Though it could be a ghost inside you, hiding! Maybe he doesn’t even know he is a ghost! . . . Or she.”

 

“But how could you even tell? I do something and say it was my decision. You say it was a ghost. It felt the same to me either way. How could you prove or disprove anything?”

 

“Have you never done anything unusual? Or that, when you looked back at it, surprised you? Actually, you have: you’ve come here. And I’m guessing that Mrs Wickes wasn’t the reason?”

 

“There’s nothing mysterious about it. I read about a Grey Lady here and wanted to find out who she was.” I told her I wanted to write something. I told her why Scarston Hall was my subject. I repeated what I’d heard about Mr Roberts and Lord Scarston. I talked about the Golden Ratio and the Hall’s interior being in Boston. It was while I was telling her about Jessopville that she gathered up the skirt of her dress to reveal long black boots. She rose like a ballerina, stepped daintily across to a window sill, and sat there, hands on the stonework, long slender fingers, long black nails, pointing down. Between the lapels of her coat, her dress rippled slightly.

 

“I don’t get you!” she said. “You want to write about Scarston Hall, but you’ve spent no time here! You have to be here, really be here. Have you heard Eskimos have 144 words for snow? They see it longer, so they see it deeper. Which is why you have to be here, alone, silent, for a long time, like I was, so it can seep into you.”

 

“. . .”

 

“Things changed here the moment you came: there’s a bit of you here now, forever. And you’re a different person too.”

 

“. . .”

 

“And where you are tells you who you are. Right now, you’re at Scarston Hall. So you may as well listen. Who knows what you might find out.”

 

* * ¹⁷ * *

 

I turned down the slip road onto the motorway and carefully rejoined the traffic.

 

I hope so, she’d said. I wished I’d asked her name. No, I was just longing for a female body, that was all. And this relentless obsession with personal authenticity! First that librarian, now her. But we never escape other people’s stories; we’re born into them, schooled in them, we’re absorbing them every day. They don’t suddenly vanish the moment we pick up a pen. I might spend hours at Scarston Hall but it’s other people’s language I use to decide how I feel about it. And yet in retelling someone else’s story, chances are there’s no one on the planet who’d choose exactly the same words as me. I’d rearrange all the elements to suit myself – stress this, downplay that, draw a connection here, preach a moral there.

 

Maybe see you here again, I’d said, leaving. I hope so, she’d said, with the shade of a smile. Bewitching. Or was it just a lonely man’s fantasy? I wished she'd told me her name.

 

The irony was, although I’d pretended I’d come to Scarston with an open mind, in fact I’d imagined various scenarios for a Grey Lady - a woman grieving, murdered, betrayed, spurned - and speculated on how I might portray them. This trip was not for a neutral uncovering of facts; it was to refine something I’d already written, if not yet put down on paper.

 

I was heading for a village called Pentrich. The Goth told me she’d been brought up there: “neat, boring and self-satisfied” was her opinion of it. But I’d actually heard about it in school because it was the site of an attempted ‘revolution’ in the slump after the Napoleonic Wars. When I got there, I found nothing to mark this event except a laminated sheet stapled onto a noticeboard in the porch of the locked church. It began with a question: “Pentrich Revolutionaries: Heroes or Villains?”

 

The ‘revolutionaries’ were a bunch of stocking-makers fearful that their skills on a loom called the Derbyshire Rib were becoming obsolete as new machines produced stockings much cheaper. “With families to support and no welfare state to fall back on,” I read, “the men of Pentrich didn’t feel they had the option of sitting back and mulling their next career move.” However, their small group had been infiltrated by a government spy who persuaded them that if they armed themselves and marched on Nottingham, rebel groups across the country would rise up in support. It was a lie of course, and after a rain-soaked hike in which they killed a man while trying to get hold of some weapons, they fled at the sight of the Light Dragoons. The leaders were eventually tried and executed, one of them – Jeremiah Brandreth, a married man with three children - saying he didn’t care if he lived or died ‘for there are no Derbyshire Ribs now.’ Others were transported to Australia. “The final humiliation came from Pentrich itself. It disowned the rebels, claiming they were from other villages, and even changed its name. (It was previously called Pentridge.)” As to the question with which it opened, the sheet concluded simply “Heroes or villains? You decide.”

 

I had come a long way to be told that. But I had come, for her. That pale face: strange how, once I got accustomed to it, how beautiful it was.

 

* * ¹⁸ * *

 

I walked to the end of Pentrich and back again. Which house had she grown up in? That I survived, she’d said. Mary Handy communicated with her, she’d said, to remind her that she’d survived. Survived what? Had some scumbag got her pregnant and dumped her too? I wished she'd trusted me, but she didn't even give me her name.

 

I ordered sandwiches in the village pub. While waiting, I skimmed the local paper. On an inside page, I caught the headline: ‘Scarston Hall to Rise Again?’ A district councillor was calling for it to be turned into flats, a hotel, or restored as a private mansion. “The cost of maintaining it as a ruin is a constant drain on the public purse,” he was quoted. “Whereas refurbishing it would bring in much-needed money and jobs.”

 

“Total effing moron!” I exhaled loudly.

 

“All right?” smirked the barman as he brought my food.

 

“Yeah, no, just reading this stuff about restoring Scarston Hall!”

 

“Can I get you anything else?” he asked.

 

“It’s just that it means something as a ruin.” The few other customers were scrutinising me. “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

 

It sank in as I ate: a world without Scarston Hall. I felt nauseous; there was sweat on my forehead. I’d spent so many months thinking about it. I’d imagined my name synonymous with its name. But soon it would be gone: just somebody else’s house.

 

I'd already been losing heart in the task I'd set myself. Was this the final blow? My trip to Scarston seemed pointless. A stronger man might've given up, but the one thing I couldn't do was give up. It didn't matter that I was wasting my time; I had nothing else to do, so my time would have been wasted anyway . . .

 

She'll grieve like me when she hears about these plans . . . She might still be there; it would be a load off my mind to go back, just in case. Or she might return the same time tomorrow morning. I’ll make sure I’m at the church by eight for Mrs Wickes, then I’ll head out onto the lawn. She might be there. I’ll tell her what I've learned. And I'll tell her I took her advice. That I spent time at Scarston Hall, and listened . . . I have no plans, no agenda: a short comradely vigil at a place I now know to be doomed, that’s all.

 

* * ¹⁹ * *

 

There was a traffic jam on the main road back to Scarston, so I took an intricate diversion along minor roads. Descending a slope not far out of Pentrich, there was a view sprung from oils on a canvas: dewy green hills, the closest topped by a mediaeval ruin, the woods of the Derwent valley, the Peak District moors beyond. Vast and perfect, a dream to hide in.

 

My route took me through Jessopville. On the main road was a pub, no doubt once the soul of the condemned village. Between the upstairs windows was strung a white sheet daubed with the words ‘Last Day Today!’ in bright red.

 

Scarston Hall again: my fifth visit in three days. I’d been drawn here by a ghost, yet it was me doing all the haunting. I fished out a couple of plastic bags from my boot and went down the lawn looking for somewhere to sit. In three years, then, all this might be gone. Of course, everywhere is provisional, every building and every landscape a work in draft. But the future is usually invisible; it lets the present loom as large as it feels. Not here though, not now. Already I imagined the Hall as an exclusive hotel, this lawn a golf course, with bunkers, little flags and the affluent semi-retired hiding their time. I came here with a story in mind, but the story which brings us to the gates of a posh hotel is quite different from the one which leads us through an exposed ruin. They were equally fine metaphors: the posh hotel is just as valid an evocation of England. But it isn’t the country I know, or care about.

 

I placed myself in one of the window cavities on the east front.

 

My legs dangled uncomfortably, so I raised them onto the ledge, turning to lean onto the casement. Very soon I had to straighten my back and budge up a little to relieve the pain on my vertebra.

 

Then the flesh under my sitting bones began to sting. So I jumped down, found a patch of longer grass, laid my plastic bags there, and sat facing the Hall.

 

I checked my watch.

 

I tried to remember exactly where the Goth had been sitting.

 

I scanned the east front, up and down, left and right, noticing variations in the colour of the sandstone: black in a few nooks and crannies, in other places yellowish, reddish, purplish, brownish, these tinges sometimes occupying a small area, sometimes streaming across the façade. Patterns unfathomable to me but which would have acquired a familiar rhythm to generations intimate with this place. A Grey Lady. Those patterns might be the closest I get to her.

 

I closed my eyes and focused on the drone of the motorway with its periodic high-pitched roars. Motorbikes? Sports cars? Was it possible to work out the average speed of traffic by sound alone? But there would be too many complicating factors – lorries, rain, wind direction . . .

 

I checked my watch again: only a few minutes had passed.

 

I felt a chill. It had been a long hot summer and I'd forgotten what it was like to be cold. I had passed into the shadow of the Hall so I got up and moved to a sunnier spot. I laid back on the grass and wriggled around to find comfort in its lumpy hardness.

 

I closed my eyes again and tried to cease the constant inward chatter by imagining nothingness. The impossibility of it did calm me for a while, even the growing cold registering as an idea rather than an icy burn . . .

 

What if someone sees me here? What if they call the police, report me for loitering? How long am I going to stay here? And what am I looking for anyway? If there is, or was, a Grey Lady here, if there is, or was, a story around her, I’ll never find out. (That Mrs Wickes won’t know anything; she’d have told the tale to the vicar or Captain Birdseye if she did.) But perhaps her elusiveness is the story . . . An outsider searches for what he imagines to be a local legend, only to find it is as alien as he is. Everyone he meets is as singular as he is and speaks only for themselves. And then it turns out the ruin at the heart of it is to be tamed and monetised. Yes, that would work. All it needs is a dramatic, climactic gesture, a last-ditch vain effort to find the Grey Lady.

 

I would have to spend the night at Scarston Hall.

 

I opened my eyes. Here, outdoors, undefended, at the place my car had been vandalised? (‘The night is a foreign country,’ I reworked that famous opening line. ‘Who knows what they do there?’) I wished the idea would go away, but nothing came to supplant it. I had to have credibility, and the price of credibility is courage.

 

I got up and stared at the booming parade of cyborg supertravellers in the valley below - innumerable, anonymous, and free – before drifting back to the Hall.

 

“You still here?” came a voice as I entered. It was Captain Birdseye.

 

“Where’s your friend today?” I asked, feigning cheeriness.

 

“Banjo’ll be here in his own time. Did you see Beth – Beth Wickes? I spoke to her yesterday, said you wanted to talk.”

 

“I’m hoping to catch her tomorrow morning,” I said. Yes, this time I would be waiting for her.

 

“She hadn’t heard about a Grey Lady, she’s looking forward to meeting you.”

 

“Well, she may be disappointed. The Grey Lady’s turning out to be even greyer than I imagined. Unless her name was Mary Handy.”

 

“Mary Who? Handy?”

 

At this point, the dog plodded listlessly into view and came to a weary stop. His head hung and his tongue dangled, his whole body a burden.

 

“You know,” said the Captain, “he was very sensitive when he was young. I remember we went to some old priory ruins Retford way. Lovely grass between the stones, we thought he’d love it. But we couldn’t get him out the car! He whimpered, dragged, scratched, finally bit me, till we gave up and left him in there. Custodian said the place was haunted and most dogs reacted the same way. But all the times we’ve been here, not a murmur from him . . .”

 

“. . . How old is he?”

 

“Thirteen – that’s a lot in dog years! He’s arthritic now unfortunately. But every morning and every evening he stands by the door, waiting for his walk. My wife used to take him mornings, me in the evening. But we lost her last year, didn’t we chum?! She thought the world of him. Picked him out herself as a puppy, called him ‘Banjo.’ Do you remember them? Her favourite chocolate bar. So as long as he’s around - and of course I’m retired, so we like our walks, don’t we chum?! . . . Right let’s go and have another look at our view.”

 

“Mind if I join you?” I asked.

 

We went out the east front, past the spot the Goth had been sitting, beyond the place the photographer had set his tripod. We didn’t say much at first. Then, as the valley bottom and its motorway came into view, the Captain sighed. “It didn’t use to be so green: pits, slag heaps, dirt everywhere. And now . . . it’s quite beautiful.”

 

“It’s a strange mix round here, isn’t it? Not a city, not really rural. One minute it’s green and photogenic, the next it’s mining villages one after the other. You’ll see a hill and, up close, it’s grassed-over coal waste. . . . Nice though – a bit of everywhere.”

 

“There’s a lot of places like that,” he replied. “Few years ago, we went to the Lake District and saw on the map how close it was to the coast. Fancied a day at the seaside, but it was all mining and industrial, not what we expected at all. We went through one village, it could have been Jessopville!”

 

“. . . Did you work in the mines yourself?”

 

“I was a miner, yes. Jessop colliery, just down the road. Do you know how long? Precisely one day!”

 

Apparently, he’d had asthma. He’d insisted on working in the mine anyway. His father was charge engineer there. But on that first day, after an hour or so at the coal face, he’d been unable to breathe properly. He couldn’t even make it out, up the steep drift, and been carried. He was distraught, but returned to the mine to work in the office. He ended up responsible for the miners wages, and had a succession of payroll and accounts jobs over the years, culminating at that metal shed I’d passed on my way here.

 

“It was a slick operation,” he told me as his dog padded up beside us. “Film from Japan, cartridges from France, brought to Derbyshire for us to thread one into the other and ship them out again, all over the world.” When that factory was rationalised out of existence, he took early retirement. “Back when I was a young man, it was hard thinking I wasn’t up to the work most of my friends were doing. But it’s the best thing that happened to me really. Because if I’d continued at Jessop, I’d never have worked at Woodhouses, which I where I met Eunice, my wife.”

 

Words dried up a bit after that, so as we headed back up to the Hall, I resumed my criminal investigations. “One thing I’d appreciate your opinion on: someone vandalised my car here last night, scratched it down the side with glass. I’ve not called the police or anything, not sure it’s worth it. But I don’t suppose you saw anyone here, or in the village, looking a bit suspicious . . .?”

 

“Not really,” said the Captain equivocally. “. . . I’m very sorry to hear about it though,” he added keenly. “It must’ve given you a bad impression.”

 

“No, you get it everywhere. It’s not a big deal compared to . . . that Jack Bond stuff. But no, you get that everywhere too.”

 

He groaned and shook his head. “A tragedy, that. Twenty-one years and I still remember it like yesterday. He was at school with my cousin, you know. A long time after I’d been there. Jack Bond, yes. Funny thing, it wasn’t a big school but when he became famous, no one could remember him. We knew the name – sort of, he was John Bond then - but weren’t sure of his face. Even when his picture was in the papers we didn’t recognise him. Fancied himself as the next David Bailey.”

 

“What, he was a photographer?”

 

“Yes, started out doing local landmarks, people of the area. Got noticed, had his photos published in magazines, even abroad. Next thing he was doing celebrities, fraternising with models and pop stars. Got himself a sports car, worst decision he ever made . . .”

 

“I’ve just had a horrible thought! I’d never have known about Scarston Hall if I hadn’t seen a photo. It was quite an old book: sixties or early seventies maybe, that would tie in, wouldn’t it? What if it was one of his!”

 

“It’s possible, but it’d be a hell of a coincidence.”

 

“It gives me the creeps thinking about it . . .”

 

“You see it all the time, though: people risking accidents like that.”

 

“Accidents like what?”

 

“The boy. Mowing him down in his car.”

 

“Oh . . . is that what happened?”

 

“He panicked, didn’t know what to do. Ended up lifting the boy and leaving him by the side, under some trees. He wasn’t living local by then, but someone had seen him going like the clappers up that road. And there weren’t any Triumph Spitfires round here . . . He admitted it to the police straightaway, but everyone was asking why he’d not gone to them in the first place, or even taken the boy to hospital – I think he may still’ve been alive when Bond left him. He didn’t know, just couldn’t explain what he’d done. Most people thought he was scared for his reputation. Like I said, he was just taking off as a photographer, meeting all the rich and famous. It was turning into a charmed life for him and he didn’t want to lose it.”

 

“Makes you think . . . how would you behave in those circumstances? I hope I’d do the right thing, but . . . I’ve heard it said: it’s how you act under extremes that shows who you really are. I suppose most of us die not knowing.”

 

“That’s probably a good thing,” the Captain mused.

 

“So what happened to him?”

 

“Bond? Served a few months. Nothing really. But round here, no one would talk to him. He’d go in a shop and be ignored. I’m not saying it’s right, but . . . anyway, he wasn’t local by then as I said. He lives down south somewhere. He must still know people here; once in a while, someone’ll say they’ve seen him.”

 

“It’s like you’re a hundred different people," I said, drifting back to my previous thoughts. "The ones you know and the ones you don’t because they never show themselves. I met someone here this morning: a woman in black, a Goth. Do you know her by any chance? Said she’d been here before? She was talking about being possessed by ghosts. Maybe she's half-right, except they’re not ghosts but all those people we could be but never are.”

 

We had long since halted in the car park – even Banjo was standing beside us, snorting heavily. “You’re a young man,” the Captain sighed. “Don’t spend too much time chasing ghosts! You’ll have plenty of chance to do that when you get to my age. Many’s the time I see something, or hear it, and think ‘I’ll have to tell Eunice about that’ . . . Right, chum, let’s go and have some tea . . .”

 

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you,” I said. I watched the pair shuffle off and disappear. I stood for a minute, till my restless legs escorted me on a meander across the car park. So who are those people haunting me, these people I could be but am not? I can only exorcise them by bringing them to life. Stepping off my own path and walking theirs for a while . . .

 

I really would have to spend the night at Scarston Hall.

 

I struck off into the village, marching resolutely through it and out, back to the main road. I bought some sandwiches, crisps and a drink at a petrol station, and returned to Scarston. There was no one about, only a sullen youth in one of the driveways, polishing a car. Just by the Hall, I diverted down a long farm track, coming in due course to a farmhouse and cluster of outbuildings. A massive dog pounced out of nowhere, barking vitriol. It tore at the metal gate between us, forcing its snout between the bars.

 

* * ²⁰ * *

 

The shell of Scarston Hall reared up, black against the deepening skyglow of the coalfield towns. She was right, I thought, it is a terrible place. But even in my nervy state, I sensed the thrill and the drama in what I was about to do. I wasn’t especially eager to begin, though, and sat in my car for an hour, eating, checking my watch, wondering how I would get through the night.

 

I opened my boot and took out an anorak. There was also a blanket, of uncertain origin, and a foam sleeping mat I’d borrowed months ago for a camping trip that’d been cancelled.

 

Inside one of the wings at the west front was a slatted wooden platform, like the floor of a vanished toolshed. It resonated deeply as I stepped onto it – there was presumably some cavity beneath: the staircase to Mary Handy’s cellar? It would be, in my story . . . Anyway, the platform was firm, mostly clean and more than long enough: so with everything I had, I was set up for a bed.

 

Not that I intended to sleep. I would sit the night out if I could, watching and listening. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I was able to pick out walls, doors, windows. The gravel surface shone dimly, lit by skyglow. Trapezoid illuminations swelled across the room as a set of car headlights approached, then vanished as they turned into the farm track.

 

On that side of the Hall, at that time of night, the motorway didn’t intrude, and I could hear the occasional rustle of the trees in the car park. I found the quiet uneasy. My ears were pricked for the slightest disturbance, my breath tensed to minute vibrations, my heart simmered. There was a scampering beneath me, sending shivers like cold fingers down my spine. Then silence - as if the mouse had only that one journey to make tonight.

 

Time passed, nothing happened. I saw nothing and heard nothing. I got up and, finding my way by touch and shadow, groped through a couple of rooms before I misjudged a step and found myself clutching gravel. I expected pain, but there was none. I returned to my impromptu camp and, out of boredom, decided I would try to sleep after all.

 

I laid on my back. The foam mat was feeble against the iron hardness of the platform. It was so uncomfortable that I burst out laughing. I thought of the old gazetteer I had to thank for everything. I’d tried in vain to find it a second time. I was told a lot of “dead wood” had just been taken off the shelves but, if I was interested, I should look out for the next surplus book sale. That was months ago.

 

I suppose I fell asleep eventually. Or came close to it, to a sleep that wasn’t sleep, a numb and drowsy consciousness. A state which seemed to exist for a long time before I noticed it, before I tried to stretch and push out into its confines, only to find it was rigid as plaster and I had been encased in it like a mummy. My will tried to assert itself: ‘Open!’ ‘Move!’ ‘Speak!’ But my eyelids took no notice, my hands would not budge, my larynx was insolent.

 

Who was this, breathing? Whose hands were these, pressing down onto my chest? Nothing but skin separating us, I was at her mercy. And then, though my eyelids were sealed, I saw her: a woman with long grey hair, thin ashen face, groaning wordlessly, leaning over me, showing me . . . a sketch pad. Turning the pages, each one blank. Forcing me to look at them, every blank page. White space after white space after white space.

 

'I’m sorry, I’m sorry.' But even as I tried to soothe her with these thoughts, I was conscious of doubts flitting beneath them: ‘But this is Mrs Stainley! She can’t be the Grey Lady!’

 

Her wailing grew so loud I could feel it coursing through me. And then I realised I’d been lured here by Jack Bond himself. He’d sent me a photograph, a face so beautiful, of such perfect composition, that I couldn’t resist. And so I had come, to take his punishment for him, to be offered up to the mournful demon he had awoken. 'No, I'm not him! I’m not him!' I wasn’t getting through to her. Terrified, I threw everything my spirit could summon against the paralysis; I heaved once, twice, three times - as if to vomit, to scream at the top of my voice . . .

 

. . . And she was gone. I was like a man on an operating table, recovering from anaesthetic, beset by incomprehensible sensations. But one of these I came to recognise as a sound, a high-pitched roar . . . a car revving with accelerator thrust to the floor. My body was reanimated with a brazen energy.

 

There was a screeching of tyres loud enough to stir the dead. I tore out of the ruins of Scarston Hall to find my car had come to life. Its gleaming white eyes were terrifying. Perhaps overcome by the enormity of its rebellion, it fumbled on the gravel and nearly crashed a gatepost. In the time it took to reverse and launch itself again toward freedom, I was bearing down on it. I hurled myself right between its eyes, but its mind was made up: it threw me forward, deep punches came up at me from the ground, and my car advanced on me, growling with a noise I never dreamt it capable of.

 

* * ²¹ * *

 

I watched as the police pricked, scraped and dabbed at my car, and as they dispatched it to a scrapyard where it was gouged, disembowelled and finally dropped into the crusher. I watched as it lay there, emasculated, between advancing walls of iron.

 

Except that I have lost all physical sensation of the passage of time. I can’t be sure if I watched those events, or have just imagined I did.

 

Turns out Dave Parker was not completely honest when I told him about the vandalism to my car. There had been previous ‘incidents’ - usually settled informally by the lad’s parents without the police being involved. They were doing their best, Dave had thought, no use making more trouble for them. He’d have a quiet word when he could.

 

Of course, he was shocked by what the lad went on to do that night. The youth has a pathological hatred of strangers (though like most people in Scarston, his family were strangers there once). He’d warned me: my return to the Hall was a serious provocation. Walking past his home, looking him in the face, well that was the final straw. He was such a potent figure in my last days, yet so camouflaged I never saw him. He wailed like a child when he was arrested.

 

As for Dave, well, he thinks about me every day. Shakes his head and wishes he could undo the past. Old Banjo is going rapidly downhill, as if the cessation of his walks at the Hall is an omen. Dave will be grieving again soon. I wish I could talk to him. But I can’t make my presence felt – if I’m present at all. I can be anywhere I want: I've seen Mark Major on his fiddle, playing with his band, eyes closed like someone transported. I’ve seen him hunched up head in hands, staring at a sheet of paper, line after line thoroughly scribbled out except for a single short couplet: ‘I wish I could be / the man that you see.’ Yet with all this knowledge, and more, I'm mute, impotent.

 

It’s Emily I really want to talk to, Emily Whiteside. Yes, she had survived, survived the birth her mother hadn’t. She’s been here again since she heard the news, hoping to get something from me. Just as well I can't communicate: I haven’t the heart to tell her there’s no Mary Handy here. No Grey Lady either. In fact, there are no ghosts at Scarston Hall. Or else they’re as hidden from their peers as from the living . . .

 

So am I a ghost now? I can't be: ghosts are mindless things. What am I then? My theory is, I'm the final hallucinations of my super-excited brain. Everyone knows fear slows time down; you can see the punch, the bullet coming at you. Or the front wheel of your own beloved car. So I was already on a very slow clock the moment the first fragment of skull pierced my cortex, the violence of it provoking lightning-fast trails along axons and across synapses, some well-worn, some new. Making me believe that Emily wants to contact me, and that Emily is her name.

 

But though this instant has been stretched and twisted out of all recognition, I cannot escape reality for long. Sooner or later, my last electrochemical substratum of consciousness will have been pulverised, to seep down into the car park at Scarston Hall, and I will fade unknowing into oblivion.

 

In the meantime, there's nowhere I'd rather be than here, this black box staring out from the crest of a green hill, just where you might glimpse it from the motorway as you cross an insignificant brook, before you speed into the sliced-off tail of the hill, and we are gone.