Thomas tosses another log into the firepit and grins with a boozy delight as it sends a cloud of sparks flying high up in the chilly autumn air. Susan pulls her feet underneath her body and draws her hands up into her sleeves in a futile effort to keep them warm.
“…Catherine was only 16-years-old when the villagers came for her,” Lucy continues her story. “But most shockingly, it was her brother, the new Earl of Osterley, who strode at the front of the howling mob. The torch in his fist would likely have sent sparks flying… not unlike our firepit just now, I suppose. Did the Earl believe the tales about his younger sister? Or was this a convenient way for him to increase his share of the family’s fortune?”
“Any more wine, anyone?” Thomas successfully manages to ruin Lucy’s attempt to creepify the Hallowe’en atmosphere. It earns him an annoyed scowl from his wife, and a grateful grimace from Susan. My On/Off girlfriend isn’t one for gothic horror, really. Personally, I am not too fussed about it: I am too well-grounded to feel frightened, but too tipsy to resent having to sit through some made-up nonsense story.
I do hold out my glass towards our host, though, because I am not too tipsy to make full use of the produce of Thomas’s extensive and expensive wine cellar.
“We will never know what motivated the young Lord Osterley, but we do know that his revenge was frightful. Mary Wood, Lady Catherine’s maid, is on record as having pleaded with her mistress to flee immediately, running out the rear door while she still could… but even if she had been able to get away, where could she go? It was almost midnight on All Hallows’ Eve, 1523 – a young girl travelling alone, barefoot, in her nightgown? While the countryside was in turmoil? She would have stood no chance…”
Susan is rocking in her seat – whether that is to stay warm, or to dispel the effects of Lucy’s story, I cannot tell.
“By the time she had saddled a horse and thrown on a cloak, the mob had surrounded the house… you will have to picture them: 160 or 170 men and women with torches, cudgels, pitchforks, threatening her, baying for her blood. Some just stood silently, ominously. Others shouted abuse at the darkened house: accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, accusations that she had used black magic to cause villagers to fall ill, cattle to die and crops to fail.”
Our narrator sighs and now holds out her glass too. The silence pervading the moonless night air around us feels oppressive. The sorrowful flickering light of the dying flames is not enough to provide relief.
“Her brother, accompanied by two manservants, entered the house, and confronted her. She could either surrender to him, his ultimatum went, or he would throw her to the villagers’ wrath. Perhaps, with hindsight, the latter would have been better – pure agony but mercifully quick – but she must have thought that she could trust her brother to show a level of compassion.”
Another sigh, a sip of wine, another pregnant silence.
“The family records don’t provide many details, but they do tell us that the 11th Earl of Osterley incarcerated his sister in a windowless closet, ordering the only doorway to be bricked up once she was inside. The location of her eternal resting place wasn’t specified, except that it was somewhere in the East Wing.”
“The East Wing is the only part of Osterley House that still stands,” Thomas, the 28th Earl of Osterley, clarifies, nodding at their home, the grand building behind me.
“The main reason why we are telling you two this, though, is to warn you that there have been incidents since. Reports of fleeting sightings, mysterious sounds… a girl in a white dress and green cloak roaming in the night. Most worryingly, there have been unexplained deaths and disappearances over the intervening centuries…”
“Oh, Lucy, please, no! Now you are going too far…” Susan covers her ears.
“It is not some fictional tale, Susan, but a candid warning. These are all true events… This has all happened. On the morning of November 1st, 1723, the 18th Earl was found in his bed, eyes bulging with fear – according to the records, he looked to all accounts like he was scared to death.”
“I have seen the report in the annals, and Lucy isn’t lying. That is literally what the family records say… But he might just have had a heart attack, of course. They didn’t have much in the way of pathology in those days.”
Lucy sends him another irritated frown.
“Perhaps, but how do you explain this then? In 1823, there was a Hallowe’en party at Osterley. That night, one of the guests, the second son of the Marquess of Dorset, disappeared without a trace. He was observed going to his room late on the 31st of October, but he wasn’t there the next morning. They searched the house, the grounds, the country, the world… The guy had vanished, disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.”
“He might just have gone for an early morning walk to clear his hangover,” I suggest. “Got set upon by some opportunistic robbers and buried in a shallow grave.”
“And in 1923,” she ignores my interruption, “Lord Cudworth, Thomas’s great-grandfather’s father-in-law jumped to his death from his bedroom window in the early hours of the 1st of November. Why would he do that, if not to flee from something worse?”
“Or did he fall out, Darling? Possibly after over-enjoying great-granddad’s hospitality?”
The Countess of Osterley shakes her head in frustration at our lack of gullibility – or our lack of receptiveness, she will feel, I guess.
“1523, 1723, 1823, 1923,” Susan whispers apprehensively, despite Thomas’s and my attempts to deflect some of the suspense. “All the violent incidents happened on centenaries of the initial attack… and today is Hallowe’en 2023.”
“Finally!” Lucy rolls her eyes demonstratively, “someone who understands what I am trying to get at.”
“Will it be safe? Will it be safe to sleep here tonight? Five-hundred years to the day that Lady Catherine was bricked up?! Isn’t someone bound to get killed tonight?”
“Darling…” I pull Susan towards me for a kiss on the side of her head. “Only three putative events in 500 years, but the first one was probably a heart attack, the next a young man who disappears, probably got himself killed in a fight or something, the final one a drunk AOP who tripped tragically while closing a window… That does not amount to a convincing reason for us to get into my car and kill ourselves by crashing drunk into a tree…”
I look towards our hostess mildly disapprovingly. “You should know better, Lucy. It is unfair to make up scare stories, when Susan is your audience.”
“I didn’t make up anything!” she protests. “Every event is as they happened, or at least as the records say they happened.”
Thomas grins at my look of exasperated disbelief. “Shall we call it a night, people? It is too late already, and the embers of the fire are barely enough to stop me dying from hypothermia… which may well go down in the family annals as ‘he froze to death the moment he was told about Lady Catherine’.”
“You don’t want your life story retold in 100 years?” I laugh, “by your great-granddaughter-in-law as she regales how you died inexplicably on the 500th anniversary of the original lynching?”
Thomas, always a cheerful drunk, laughs along, as he herds us into their home. Lucy is a little annoyed with me for making fun of her story, while Susan is feeling cold, scared and generally miserable. I am therefore disappointed but not surprised when she declines my suggestion that she comes with me to my room for a bit of ‘you know what’.
Osterley House is magnificent. It is enormously large – astonishingly so, taking into account that only about a third of the original house from 1412 survives – it is sumptuous, somewhat rickety in places, but oozing with character and appeal. I’ve stayed here maybe a dozen times over the years, and it has always been an event. The bedroom where I’ll sleep tonight is bigger than my entire apartment – it is in the part of the house that used to be the chapel, I think, going by the arched windows and the vaulted ceilings. How many people can claim to have slept in a 600-year-old former chapel?
I am slightly miffed to be denied the chance for a little R-and-R with my girlfriend – miffed at Lucy for ruining the atmosphere, rather than miffed at Susan for not being in the mood. Lucy knows that Susan doesn’t deal well with that sort of supernatural nonsense. The original story itself wasn’t too bad, despite some rather gruesome details about the Plague, deformed lambs, and other alleged evidence of witchcraft. The paranormal bollocks at the end, though, about those later deaths and disappearances due to the ghostly Lady Catherine, that was all a bit too much.
Teeth brushed and body freshened up, I crawl into a 4-poster bed large enough to host a sizable orgy, disappointed that I will not be hosting anything of the sort tonight.
Although, to be honest, I am not sure that I am in a state to participate in anything so exciting after having drunk a bottle-and-a-half of Tom’s heady Burgundy. I am feeling so tired that the scary lady with the green cape will have a hard time of it, if she wishes to wake me up for some playful terrorising in the small hours of the morning.
The mattress is soft, the pillow is silky, the duvet…
… hmmm… nice warm duvet…
It takes me a moment to find my bearings. Not home, that is for sure – my London flat is never this dark.
The eerie groan, I realise, comes from a hundreds-of-years-old oak beam settling as the temperature outside drops. Osterley House… I am at Osterley.
I should have guessed that sooner, because it is the only place I know where I can spreadeagle my 6-foot-7 almost-Olympic rowers’ physique without getting anywhere near the edge of the bed. I roll over onto my other side and pack the fluffy pillow under my head. Even just the beds are a reason to accept every invitation to stay overnight here.
The only thing that could make it better is having my girl share the joy of this magnificent bed with me.
Stupid Lucy…
Stupid ghost story…
Stupid Susan for allowing herself to be unnerved so much that she didn’t want me to make love to her last night.
She isn’t usually that naïve. When I try to make up an excuse for coming home late, she sees through me instantly. So why can’t she see that the notion of a 500-year-old dead teenager murdering house guests is plainly ridiculous?
My eyes fly open at the sound of a loud crack.
… another beam settling…
Was that a movement? Just in the corner of my eye? There is nothing to see when I lift my head to stare in the direction of the flutter… but there definitely was some movement when I didn’t look directly at it…
Christ!
Et tu, Aaron?
Letting Lucy’s fantasies affect your subconscious, are we?
Are you now going to lie awake trembling at the idea of ghostly girls in white dresses?
It was probably the curtain moving in the ever-present draught, causing a faint shadow to move across the wall.
If I am going to lie awake thinking of girls in white dresses, I might as well enjoy it, right? Let’s picture Michelle Culbertson in the flighty dress she wore in ‘Across the River’.
… hmm, Michelle Culbertson…
I roll over onto my back – lying like that, it is easier to slide my hand into my shorts, where I can enjoy the feeling of my fat tool which enthusiastically approves of me fantasising about the divine Ms Culbertson. Yes, I agree that it is disrespectful that I went from thinking about my girlfriend to rubbing myself over my favourite actress in under a minute, but in my defen…
That was definitely a movement!
By the window…
Nothing that I can see though…
Somehow, I am now sitting upright in bed, it seems.
And there! By the door…
Nothing again when I stare at the distant doorway.
Outside a woman screams in fear, mortal fear!
“Oh Bloody Hell! Bloody foxes!”
Not a woman’s scream, just an effing fox trying to entertain the ladies, or something foxy like that. My heart is thumping heavily in my throat.
Jesus, Aaron, calm down, you moron! Lie back! You are getting yourself worked up over nothing.
The house groans again, but that is a sound I am familiar with.
Deep breaths, slow breaths, get your heartrate under control. Eyes closed, focus on your breathing…
In… Hold… Out… Hold… In…
A sigh…
… Hold… Out… Hold…
Another sigh, in the corner to my left.
… In… Hold…
That is not the House sighing.
… Out… Hold…
…
She is beautiful.
I have opened my eyes, apparently. I have opened my eyes to see the girl standing in the corner of my bedroom… and she is beautiful. Young and innocent, a demure white dress – nothing like Michelle’s skimpy number – and an emerald cloak over her shoulders.
Why am I not afraid?
It is because of her smile, I think, which is kind and reassuring. She’s not a witch! How could anyone have believed that she was a witch?
She stretches out a hand towards me, moving elegantly as a ballerina. It is extended as an invitation to come to her.
She’s beautiful.
She wouldn’t hurt me – how can she? Someone as lovely as that could not intentionally hurt another human being.
I fold back the duvet, get a shock as the cold air hits me. It is freezing in my room, it seems. I’ve slept here over Christmas last year, but even in the middle of winter, the house was not as cold as this. I consider lying back and covering up again, but the girl needs me. That is why she’s here, I am sure. She is soliciting my help, not threatening me.
I crawl off the bed, allow her to take my hand.
She’s so young – 16, Lucy said – and she’s tiny, barely reaching my nipples. She looks up to me with a smile, a grateful smile. She’s beautiful.
“Don’t worry, I will help you in whatever way you need to find peace.”
Another sad smile, this one with a silent nod – a relieved nod.
The girl, Lady Catherine, turns and leads me by the hand across the bedroom. So cold, how can it suddenly be so cold in here?
In the impenetrable darkness deeper inside the room, I stumble over a rug.
Was this alcove always here? She leads me to a recess in the far wall, a small – nay tiny – recess, barely large enough to fit my broad frame. My bare foot steps on something sharp as I follow her inside.
What the fuck?!
Where has she gone?!
One moment I follow her in – the next she’s gone and there is nobody in the niche with me. I step back, retreating into my bedroom…
… except that my back hits something. Something sturdy. Something hard and solid. Like stone…
I manage to turn around, my shoulders scraping against the raw brick of the alcove’s sides. I can’t see my room. I should at least be able to see the fuzzy outlines of the 4-poster bed silhouetted against the faint glow of dawn peeping around the curtains. But there is nothing, not a shimmer, not a single beam of light, nothing.
Utter pitch-black darkness.
When I stick out my hand, I hit a wall, a brick wall separating me from my room.
What the fuck is happening? Where the fuck am I? How the fuck did I get in here?
And most significantly, how the fuck do I get out?!
Slow breaths again, Aaron!
In… Out… In… Out…
Calm yourself down, because panicking is not going to help.
In… Hold… Out… Hold… In…
Right! Rational explanations and solutions only.
You sleepwalked into here, and if you can walk in, you can walk out again too. You just have to find the way to do that.
My hands explore the walls, rough brick, raw under my fingers. Crumbly and dusty, centuries-old brick. Rock-hard and uninterrupted on all four sides around me. I am in a niche, 2-feet square or so, and at least 9 feet high, because I cannot feel the top. I hit the walls with my fist, but it all sounds disappointingly solid. No hollow echoing to tell me which is the hidden door I must have passed through.
There is a logical explanation, Aaron, there must be!
“Hello?!”
…
“Can anyone hear me?!”
…
It is still the middle of the night, You Idiot. Save your vocal cords till the moment when someone might be in your room.
How will I know though? My mobile is by the bed, and it is dark as hell in here. How will I know when it is daytime? How will I know when there is someone searching for me? I might hear them, I guess. If I can hear them call out for me, I can shout back.
A stick cracks under my foot, a sharp edge cutting my toe.
What the fuck is all this crap on the floor?… Actually, perhaps there is something that may be of use down there!
With some careful writhing of my shoulders, I manage to lower myself in the cramped space far enough to touch the floor. Sticks, dry and crumbly wood… No, something else…
Oh fuck!
Oh my God…
Oh my dear merciful God…
A skull!
A human skull toppled onto its side – I am sure of it.
No!
… two skulls…
Oh no…
I knew it. From the moment I was in here, I felt it instinctively.
I’m in so much shit!
… this must be her prison cell. This must be the recess where Catherine was bricked up. It must be her skull – or one of them is, at least. Her cell, and she is still in here, because nobody ever left this space. The other skull… There is only one explanation for that…
The other skull…
The other skull must be the second son of the Duke of Whereveritwas.
He was lured here, just like I was. In the deep of the night, he was lured here, entered an apparently open niche, and inexplicably found himself bricked up in a tiny cell… That is why he was never seen again.
My heart thuds heavily in my chest as I begin to grasp the full horror of my situation.
He was tempted in here and never left, just as I was tempted here… and he died here… Like I will die here? Will I spend my final days in utter darkness, in a space too cramped to sit down? Will I go down in history as one of the mysterious disappearances?
A sound, faint but I could hear it.
“I am in here!… Behind the wall!”
I smash the solid brick with my fist in the hope that it is audible to whoever is in my room. Then I realise that I don’t know which wall to hit, that I cannot remember which wall I entered through. I’ve turned around too often. I might be hitting solid masonry several feet thick right now.
Besides, the sound I heard was the house, I think. The house settling again as it begins to warm up in the first tentative heat from the rising sun.
I am so cold!
Leaning my forehead against the brickwork, I let the tears run down my cheeks.
I hate self-pity, but in light of my impending, horrific death, I will allow myself to indulge for a while, I think. When you have just learned that you will starve to death in a stone recess the size of a coffin, tears are probably permitted.
How long do I have?
A couple of weeks? Will I be confined in this space for several weeks as my strength slowly wanes? My chest hurts – my heart is going far too fast, beating so heavily that I fear it might burst. Mind your breathing, Aaron! Stop hyperventilating! Control your breathing… slow that heart rate…
… it might be better if my heart were to explode right now, though. Quicker… as Lucy had said about the girl, better to die quick than slowly succumb in this suffocating confinement.
I focus on my breathing nonetheless… I don’t want to die, not yet… keep up the hope.
In… Hold… Out… Hold…
My friends are bound to call in the Police when they find me gone this morning. Modern technology should be able to locate this space – if this is a physical space, that is, rather than some unearthly portal of Hell.
So cold!
I am feeling cold down to my bones!
Is that due to her presence?
Is she drawing body heat from me, to warm herself?
Preserve yourself, Aaron, preserve your warmth. With some difficulty I manage to sag into the cramped space again, until I am on my haunches, arms around my legs, shoulders wedged uncomfortably between the walls, head leaning into the opposite corner.
I sit, focus on my breathing, wallow in self-pity, and listen out for any sounds.
I cannot sit like this for days!
It has only been minutes and my body screams for relief, a chance to stretch my legs and straighten my back.
I cannot stand for days either…
“What do you want, Catherine?… Human sacrifices?… Are you so angry with the world that you want to see people suffer as you suffered?”
Another creak… the house again.
Or her?
Perhaps she speaks through the house.
Is every groan from a wooden beam in reality the girl moaning, as the final stages of starvation gnawed at her bones?
Are those groans a preview of how I will feel before I perish?
I am so cold…
“You understand the desperation I am feeling right now, Catherine, because you experienced it too… How can you want others to go through what you faced?”
I don’t get a response this time… The girl’s unimaginable suffering must have hardened her heart to other people’s anguish.
It is so dark here.
And so cold.
More than anything, those two things will define my final days, I believe… Bricked up alive in this freezing, pitch-black hole until I succumb.
What will get me first? Hunger? Thirst? Cold? I don’t hold out much hope of survival anymore, if I am honest. I have come to understand that the girl, now that she has me in her grasp, won’t want to let me go. She will have powers greater than those of modern technology; knowledge that surpasses science.
A loud click…
… before the wall behind me swings outward, and I roll onto my back, my eyes hurting from the sudden overwhelmingly bright light.
“Bloody hell, that is where you were cooped up! You scared us to death, Aaron, hiding like that!”
Through my squinting eyes, I see Thomas towering over me, looking down with a mix of relief and disapproval.
“What the hell were you doing in the priest-hole?”
“There are two bodies in there… Lady Catherine, I think.”
He glances casually at the dead people near my feet. “Those are the remaining bits of Jack and Jill, Pater’s teaching skeletons… you know that my father was a Professor of Anatomy, right? Now, tell me, how did you end up in the priest-hole?”
Priest-hole? Teaching skeletons?
“I… erm… I don’t know… I had this weird dream… A girl in a white dress, with a green cloak… and suddenly I was inside a tiny bricked-up space, and I couldn’t get out. I thought that Lady Catherine had lured me into her prison to die there… as she had died 500 years before.”
Tom’s eyes go wide in surprise, before a huge grin splits his face. Soon he is laughing so hard that he has to sit down next to me, leaning against the wall.
“You actually believed…” he’s got trouble getting the words out. “Lucy, Darling! Come here!… Aaron genuinely thought…” Fortunately, his insultingly loud amusement is interrupted by a coughing fit.
“Oh, Aaron, My Love,” Lucy is somewhat more comforting, “that was really just a ghost story. I made it up – entirely, from the first case of Black Death in the village to the mysterious fatal fall of Lord Cudworth. All fiction!”
“So there was no Lady Catherine?”
“Well, yes, there was. But she married the Duke of Argyle in 1525, had 13 children, and lived to the ripe old age of 84.”
“Then who did I see last night?”
“Probably her sister, Lady Margaret… Their brother, the 11th Earl, had her burned at the stake…”
That sends Thomas into a new fit of howling laughter, so she is probably mocking me.
“Oh, mate,” he hugs me when he is finally able to speak more normally again. “I am so sorry about that. I shouldn’t laugh, because it must have been traumatic, not knowing how to get out of that cubbyhole… but it is just too funny.”
He gets up and, still chuckling, starts to close the heavy door. “It is a top-notch priest hole, this. Solid stone door, so that it wouldn’t sound hollow when the law enforcers knocked on the walls searching for hiding spaces. Now, I’d suggest you have a shower, because you look a mess; I’ll tell Jennings to postpone clearing the breakfast table a little longer. And let’s go for a horse ride afterwards, because the weather is perfect. We’ve had some sort of Arctic wind come in overnight, so the sky is blue while the temperatures are near-freezing.”
Comforted by a deluge of hot water, I do feel better – a lot better. I do feel a fool too. Of course there was no such person as poor bricked up Lady Catherine. And even more obviously, there are of course no such things as ghosts and paranormal events. How can I have fooled myself into believing that nonsense?
I am a moron for falling for rubbish like that!
And yet…
I can accept that my semi-sleeping mind may have conjured up the girl in white, after listening to Lucy’s Hallowe’en tale… but how can I have opened up a priest-hole that I didn’t know existed, in the middle of the night?… And more importantly, how did that heavy door fall shut behind me, spontaneously?
I still have questions – questions I do not know the answers to…
…but I am not sure I want to know them.
THE END
