Shiverton Hall (5 page)

It was around this same time that girls began to disappear from Grimstone, the nearest village. What exactly happened to these girls was never discovered. The villagers suspected Lord Shiverton, but such was his power, and their terror of him, that they were unable to do anything. In 1799, four young girls went missing, never to be seen again, and if it weren’t for the last girl, Rose Watkins, many more might have vanished too.

Rose Watkins worked as a barmaid in the Grimstone Tavern. She was seventeen, rather plump and very pretty. Rose herself was not unusual, but her mother, Ma Watkins, was very unusual indeed. Ma Watkins was in her early seventies when she gave birth to Rose, her only child. Under normal circumstances, a woman having a child out of wedlock would have been enough to have her hounded from the village, but no one dared approach Ma Watkins. Ma Watkins was commonly thought to be a witch, and the fact that she was able to conceive at such an advanced age only proved this belief. When Rose was born, other children were warned away from her, and for many years she was referred to behind closed doors as ‘the devil’s child’. However, the sweetness of Rose’s nature eventually convinced even the most hard-hearted of the villagers otherwise, and the strange circumstances of her birth became a distant memory.

That is, until Rose went missing. She had been walking back to Ma Watkins’s cottage on a balmy June night, a pink velvet ribbon in her hair, carrying some leftover pie from the tavern. The last person to see her was the landlady, who had begged that Rose wait until her son could walk her home, as it was no longer safe for girls to walk alone at night. Rose had laughed, waving gaily as she cut across a field towards her house. But Rose never arrived there.

Ma Watkins scoured Grimstone, hobbling on her crooked stick from house to house, muttering under her breath. People no longer feared her claw rapping on their doors, or her tattered cloak and misty, blue eyes; they pitied her. Soon, the entire village went out in search of Rose, battering bushes and peering down wells. The fields echoed with her name, but still Rose was not found. Days went by and the search petered out, but still Ma Watkins combed the fields, looking for a clue as to her daughter’s whereabouts.

The warm weather dissolved into rain. It became the stormiest, wettest June for over a century and all the crops were spoiled. The villagers began to whisper that it was Ma Watkins’s fault, that she was taking her grief out on them, calling the clouds with one of her spells. After the river had flooded and swept away a herd of cows, the menfolk of Grimstone gathered at Ma Watkins’s house, determined to make her leave.

Ma Watkins had already left. She was staggering, through the rain and the mud, the ten miles to Shiverton Hall, her cloak clinking with bottles and a frayed, leather tome weighing her down.

It took the old lady three days to reach the hall, for she was weak and grief-stricken. She arrived at five minutes to midnight, a bloated, yellow moon lighting her way.

Only one servant remained at Shiverton Hall, the rest having fled, terrified of their master. The butler, a man too ancient to risk leaving the warmth of the hall, answered the door to find a foul-smelling old crone on the doorstep. He tried to shoo her away, fearing his master’s wrath, but the crone barged through with surprising strength and limped, her stick screeching along the stone floor, towards Lord Shiverton’s study.

The butler watched through a crack in the study door as the old lady approached his master. Lord Shiverton, though still a large, sturdy man, appeared immobilised in his armchair, sweat beading on his brow as he struggled against an invisible force that kept him glued to the seat. The hag encircled him, mumbling words that the butler did not recognise and sprinkling a fine, blue powder on the floor. The powder fizzed and crackled, filling the room with purple smoke. She reached into her cloak and pulled out a yellowing book, chapped and peeling like dead skin, and began to read from it.

The fire in the grate burned a rushing green as Ma Watkins spoke in a low hiss. The words that left her mouth traced themselves briefly into the smoke, the letters curling up towards the ceiling. The butler plugged his ears but watched the words as they danced over Lord Shiverton’s head. It was a hex so powerful and disturbing that the butler would refuse to ever repeat it. He would only recall the last word that hovered in a thin, red vapour before Lord Shiverton’s mouth:
murderer
.

Lord Shiverton tried to hold his breath, but his lungs were too weak from choking on the purple smoke. Gasping, he inhaled, drawing the word in through his nose. For a moment, all was still. Ma Watkins watched Lord Shiverton, with a toothless grin. Suddenly, he convulsed, clawing at his throat, his eyes bulging as he struggled for air. He reached into his mouth, tearing at what was lodged in his gullet, and drew out a long, gold chain with a locket at its end. He gagged as it clattered to the floor. But this was not the last of it. Spluttering and wheezing, he retched as he pulled out a plaited lock of auburn hair, a rabbit’s foot and, lastly, a pink velvet ribbon. The choking stopped, and Lord Shiverton slumped back in his chair, exhausted.

Ma Watkins stooped to the floor and picked up the pink ribbon, lacing it through her quivering fingers. She secreted it in her cloak, along with the other missing girls’ items, the terrible evidence of Lord Shiverton’s crimes, summoned by her spell. Then she calmly turned to walk out of the room.

Lord Shiverton, some of his strength returning, stood up and began to shout, calling her a ‘stinking crone’ and a ‘devil woman’. He began to cough again, staggering after her, screaming insults at her back. He called to his butler, who remained cowering in the shadows, to stop the old woman, but she had already opened the door.

Lord Shiverton stopped in the middle of the hall, and the room was suddenly filled with a sickening gurgling as he convulsed and doubled over. Ma Watkins slammed the door behind her as he began to pull something wet and pink from his mouth. It seemed endless, this slithery tube, and with a muffled, repulsed cry, he realised what he was pulling at. Lord Shiverton desperately tried to push it back in, swallowing at the sliminess of his own intestine. But he could not stop it – it poured out of him, landing in a coiling heap at his feet.

‘Help me,’ he gasped, his mouth full of guts. ‘Help me.’

The butler could not have helped even if he had wanted to. He stood transfixed, watching as his master’s intestines were followed by his lungs, kidneys, liver and, finally, with a wet thud, his beating heart. Lord Shiverton staggered back, dragging his insides along with him, and threw himself, screaming, on to the hall’s enormous fire, leaving a bloody trail behind him.

‘It sounds like he deserved it,’ Arthur said, more repulsed by George’s story than he cared to admit.

‘He most certainly did,’ George replied, ‘but Ma Watkins’s curse didn’t stop with Lord Shiverton. It can strike any male who enters the hall.’

‘Go on,’ Arthur urged, intrigued.

‘Nope.’ George grinned. ‘You’ve had quite enough excitement for one night. It’s late, I’m going to bed.’ He got up from the chair.

‘Come on!’ Arthur protested. ‘I want to hear the rest.’

‘No, no!’ George replied loftily. ‘You’re clearly too cynical to believe me.’

‘Well, you’ll have to convince me then, won’t you?’

George pondered this. He knew he really should be getting to bed, but he never could resist the opportunity to tell one of Shiverton’s dark tales. He sat back down.

The White Arm

After Lord Shiverton’s unnatural death, his solicitors had a difficult time finding any of his relatives. Neither of his parents had had siblings, so the solicitors needed to climb very far back up the family tree to locate his heir. His beneficiary turned out to be Sir Jack Flipp, a third cousin on Lord Shiverton’s mother’s side, who had racked up a mountain of debt with some very unsavoury characters in London, and had fled to America with his wife and children.

The news of his inheritance could not have come a moment too soon, as Sir Jack was hiding from a rather fearsome debt collector in Boston, and had already pawned most of his wife’s jewellery. They sailed back to England in style, his wife in a brand new fur, and his two young boys in silk and the finest lace, and they arrived in Bristol with their heads held much higher than when they left.

Lady Flipp and the boys, Thomas and Cedric, squealed with delight when their carriage deposited them at their enormous new home. Sir Jack was not quite so keen – he preferred the gambling houses of Mayfair and the smell and pace of London, and did not feel at all ready for a life in the middle of the countryside. Apart from anything else, he would have to spend time with his children, whose names he could barely remember as it was. He decided that he would write to his solicitors to enquire about selling the carbuncle of a house – it would probably fetch a pretty penny and then they could live a life of luxury in the capital.

Cedric and Thomas raced around the house, cartwheeled through the gardens and tore through the maze, as their mother worked out how best to decorate the hulking masculinity of the interior. Sir Jack had skulked down to the cellar to sneak out a bottle of wine while his wife was distracted.

Lady Flipp was inspecting one of the bedrooms, when she looked out of the window and spied her boys by the fountain. They appeared to be talking animatedly, but not to each other – rather, they were both talking to a patch of thin air. Lady Flipp smiled to herself – how young boys amused themselves! She couldn’t clearly remember being six or eight, but she was sure she wouldn’t have been so silly as to have a conversation with nothing at all at their age!

While she was humming to herself, examining the bed linen, she heard a large splash, followed by another. She rushed to the window, but her boys were nowhere to be seen. Calling wildly to her husband, she hurtled down the stairs and towards the fountain, losing one of her velvet shoes in her hurry.

The fountain was large, much larger than it had looked from the window and far deeper than any ordinary fountain. The water was green, and glassy still. Lady Flipp sighed. Her sons must have simply thrown some stones into the water and wandered off. With huge relief, she turned to retrieve her lost shoe, but she heard a bubbling splash, and a desperate cry of ‘Mother!
’
.

Cedric was being pulled by some unseen force beneath the water of the fountain. He struggled back to the surface, only to be yanked down again, spluttering and screaming. At first, his mother thought that it was Thomas scaring his younger brother, and she yelled angrily for the game to stop. But the terror in Cedric’s eyes, and the brute force with which he was wrenched into the water, made her realise, with prickling alarm, that it was something else altogether.

Lady Flipp tried desperately to reach for her son. She could not swim and knew she would only sink like a sack of kittens were she to leap into the deep water. Cedric was too far away and was being dragged towards the hideous mermaid statue in the fountain’s centre. She screamed for her husband, but he was far below the house, unable to hear anything and already drunk on some rum he had unearthed.

Cedric clawed at the statue, trying to scrabble up the stone, but the slimy, green algae made it impossible to get a grip on it. By sheer will and fright, he eventually managed to grasp the mermaid’s tail, and he clung on to it, hoisting himself, shivering, out of the water. For a moment all was still, but what happened next was the reason that Lady Flipp would spend the rest of her life chained to the wall of an asylum.

From the depths of the fountain, a thin, tallow-white arm reached up to Cedric. It was twice as long as any arm Lady Flipp had ever seen, with extended, bony fingers and barnacled nails. Cedric whimpered as the hand groped blindly towards him, while his mother stood, frozen to the spot, too terrified to do anything, praying under her breath that it would disappear. The hand felt Cedric’s leg. It paused, as though it did not recognise human flesh, then continued to feel around the fountain, passing Cedric over. He looked at his mother, wide-eyed, with an expression she could not fathom. Cedric was now blue with cold from the freezing water. He reached for his nose, but could not prevent his sneeze. The hand, sensing the movement, skittered back towards him and, in a single movement, grabbed him around the waist and pulled him into the icy pool.