Hex on Hampton Gay - a ghost story

A cold Christmas Eve, in the year of our lord 1874. Snow on the fields, ice on the rails: hard and sharp as a crack in a rod of pig-iron. An overloaded passenger train heading north for Birmingham; running late, pressure up, double-headed from Oxford in a bid to cheat time. On she goes; on, on, thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour. Couplings heave and creak, pistons race; three hundred tons and three hundred souls a-clattering and a-swaying down the frozen line, riding on to the beat of two leviathans, raising clouds to cover the moon.

Then "Whoa there!" Shouts from a carriage as one good temperance-observing passenger raises alarm. The wagon behind the second engine is off the rails and bumping along the sleepers. Driver reacts. Instinctively, he applies the locomotive brakes and throws the regulator into reverse.

Oh to have whistled for brakes from the rear. To have consulted the manual. Then four and thirty God-fearing souls may not have met with their end that terrible night when the heavy train overran that fearful wagon of doom, plunging they all down the embankment into the frigid canal below.

Stout men on yuletide breather from yonder paper-mill most handy carried the dead and mangled to their place of work, adjacent to the Hampton Gay manor house. But when the storeroom of the mill was as full of a-weeping and a-wailing and a-lamenting as it could be; not to mention the twenty-six mutilated cadavers dripping horrid goo all over the flagstones, a foreman hearty knocked at the great wooden door of the big house.

"We bow to you as your servants, master and beseech upon you for your pardon, this night of Noels. All our miserable village hovels are full of a-grieving and a-suffering my lord. The mill is a place of death and hanging limbs. What room can you spare for these poor orphans and widows still a-shivering this night of all nights? What mercy, master, for these grieving wretches whose distress we hear a-moaning most piteous? In this fearful cold, with no-one to hold?"

The door of the big house slammed shut. Its inhabitants' joys... uninterrupted.

*

Fire and water, earth and air. Ashes to ashes, dust to dusty, slight the fall from lord to monkey.

*

From that night, the villagers spoke in low tones about a hex being placed on the old Hampton Gay house, though not a man would own it as his. The village was as nothing without blessing from the manor and all knew that, however hard they prayed to their maker, the sins of their master would be atoned by they all and right should that be, for life's a bitch.

But neither did these village folk rise from their humble doings on that spring evening in 1877 when the call went up that the old manor was ablaze. Their toiling would continue… uninterrupted; for they heard, in the gaps between the cracking and heaving of a dying house, the subdued clatter of the old wheels of the world going about their business.

The next morn saw this place of once comfortable and lordly repose now as a smouldering shell, its fireplaces exposed to the four winds, a house of no cheer. Bereft of the manor to kowtow to and left only with that squat little effort of a church such as Pevsner later sneered at most snooty, the blighted village of Hampton Gay did itself then fall, its spirit broken and all trace of the poor village hovels did wither.

Some say eyes are windows to the soul. Certainly, the windows of a house are its eyes. What can be seen from the empty mullioned windows of this old stone house? A village... as it was? That may be for the fancy of another teller in another time. But it has been said by travellers, adrift of the last train before Christmas and seeking shelter in this lonely place, that when snow is underfoot and ice is on the rails, a screak of the wrong bloody brakes may yet be heard to follow a distant cry of "Whoa there", as another darkness is layered on darkness.

And then the door goes.



Story © Adrian Brown 2010

Review: Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts

My first taste of Freeman Wills Crofts and he didn't disappoint with this nautical detection.

The writing-style is dated, but mostly easy-going and often compelling. Exclamation marks are used to denote moments of revelation and there's much "bless my soul, major, it's not often tragedy comes to Newhaven" type dialogue. Sterling stuff.

One notable difference between this Golden Age yarn and those historical detective fictions I've read by modern authors is that Crofts does little in the way of evoking atmospheres of the time through description. Journeys, even a trip on the boat-train to Dieppe, are usually over within a paragraph. Crofts wrote for a contemporary audience and not for historians yet-unborn, so backdrop details often seem taken for granted and merely sketched. But this hardly matters, for the `tache-twirling 1930s Boy's Own idyll of sleuthing with an engineering theme comes alive through the author's teasing voice and the exactitudes of his detective's reasoning. There are no female characters [notoriously hard to draw] and no attempt at a love-interest subplot, indicating Crofts knew his limits and knew his readership. This is a chap's book and, moreover, a book written for the kind of chap who had useful hobbies and who enjoyed tinkering in the garage.

The best bit, for me, comes in the final chapter. We're ten short pages from the close, on the edge of our fireside chairs, racing ahead yet wanting the fun to never end and Inspector French is staked out in the rain at 2AM, awaiting his quarry. What better time then, to spend a moment reflecting on those other cases he has investigated which also featured a sea-theme?

Crofts, you old sausage. But you needn't have worried. Even without Inspector French advertising your back-catalogue at this beautifully-judged point in the narrative, I'd still have been back for more.