Confessions from a Haunted House

I followed Sid’s squelching feet with pumping heart. The floorboards creaked beneath our feet and the candle in Sid’s hand flickered ghoulishly. The door loomed up like a wall in a slow motion accident. I did not move. Nothing could force me to lay hand on that smooth brass knob. Sid made a face at me and stepped forward. I took a step back. Sid turned the knob and I watched his face as he threw the door open. It was engulfed in horror. He let out a choking cry and his hand sprang to his mouth as he staggered backwards. Unable to resist seeing what lay beyond that terrible door, I darted a glance over his shoulder. Immediately, my own hand sprang to cover my nose and mouth. It was horrible. The cistern still gurgled and the chain swung gently. Why had Quint not opened a window …?

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1

In which Timmy and his brother-in-law, Sid, set off on the trail to terror via a beautiful naked girl with a hairbrush, and in which faint-hearted readers pack it in before the start of Chapter 2.

Chapter 2

In which we meet lovely Harper Deneuve, a distant relation from the USA, and an eventful trip from London Airport culminates in a loud bang.

Chapter 3

In which the fearless threesome visit a solicitor and Harper hears something very much to her advantage. Death is in the air.

Chapter 4

In which Timmy, Sid and Harper arrive on bleak Dartmoor and spend a night or terror – and other things – at the lonely Cock Inn.

Chapter 5

In which the intrepid trio set off on the last stage of their hazardous journey to Grimstark Manor, ancestral seat of the Deneuves, and undergo a horrifying experience.

Chapter 6

In which we enter the walls of the family seat and meet Festering, the sinister butler, and his staff: Quint, Grip and Blight. Also, excitable Lady Antionia and the aptly-named undermaid, Fanny.

Chapter 7

In which night falls, secret panels slide and three lives dangle in the balance.

Chapter 8

In which Timmy escapes from the claustrophobic terror of Grimstark Manor and shares a few idyllic moments with upper-crust Fiona Frenzy in a nearby stable, as well as learning something that advances the plot.

Chapter 9

In which skilful deduction and investigation culminate in the horrible ordeal of Blackmoor Bog.

Chapter 10

In which Sid leads an assault on the forces of evil and death strikes again in macabre circumstances.

Chapter 11

In which the flower of the county assembles at Grimstark Manor for the Hunt Ball and the curtain rises on the final act.

Chapter 12

In which there is excitement, suspense and death and your goolies drop off if you skipped the rest of the book to get to the denouement. If you don’t know what a ‘denouement’ is, your goolies drop off anyway.

Chapter 13

Which is unlucky for some.

Also available in the confessions Ebook series

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

How did it all start?

When I was young and in want of cash (which was all the time) I used to trudge round to the local labour exchange during holidays from school and university to sign on for any job that was going – mason’s mate, loader for Speedy Prompt Delivery, part-time postman, etc.

During our tea and fag breaks (‘Have a go and have a blow’ was the motto) my fellow workers would regale me with stories of the Second World War: ‘Very clean people, the Germans’, or of throwing Irishmen through pub windows (men who had apparently crossed the Irish sea in hard times and were prepared to work for less than the locals). This was interesting, but what really stuck in my mind were the recurring stories of the ‘mate’ or the ‘brother-in-law’. The stories about these men (rarely about the speaker himself) were about being seduced, to put it genteelly, whilst on the job by (it always seemed to be) ‘a posh bird’:

‘Oeu-euh. Would you care for a cup of tea?’

‘And he was up her like a rat up a drainpipe’

These stories were prolific. Even one of the – to my eyes – singularly uncharismatic workers had apparently been invited to indulge in carnal capers after a glass of lemonade one hot summer afternoon near Guildford.

Of course, these stories could all have been make-believe or urban myth, but I couldn’t help thinking, with all this repetition, surely there must be something in them?

When writing the series, it seemed unrealistic and undemocratic that Timmy’s naive charms should only appeal to upper class women, so I quickly widened his demographic and put him in situations where any attractive member of the fairer sex might cross his path.

The books were always fun to write and never more so than when they involved Timmy’s family: his Mum, his Dad (prone to nicking weird objects from the lost property office where he worked), his sister Rosie and, perhaps most importantly, his conniving, would be entrepreneur, brother-in-law Sidney Noggett. Sidney was Timmy’s eminence greasy, a disciple of Thatcherism before it had been invented.

Whatever the truth concerning Timothy Lea’s origins, twenty-seven ‘Confessions’ books and four movies suggest that an awful lot of people share my fascination with the character and his adventures. I am grateful to each and every one of them.

Christopher Wood aka Timothy Lea

CHAPTER ONE

Yes! I’m back. And before I go any further I would like to say a word to all those people who sat down to write a letter begging me to produce another book: why did I never hear from you? I suppose something came up on the telly or your pencil broke? You did not know the address? Excuses, excuses. If you really cared you’d have done something about it instead of leaving everything to mum and her sandwich board. Up and down, up and down, outside the publishers. Her poor old feet wore a groove in the pavement. ‘Bring back Timothy Lea’ it said on one side of the board, ‘Millions morn’ on the other. She meant to say ‘Mourn’ but spelling was never her strong point. Seeing a chance to cash in on some free advertising, the publishers rushed out a book called Million’s Morn and made a small fortune. They are very sharp, publishers. Anyway, in the end they reckoned that she was letting the tone of the place down and gave in, so here I am. Thank you, mum.

Actually, what brought me back was not the chance of making a few bob [Pull the other one! Editor] but my desire to tell the world about a really astonishing series of events that completely reshaped my belief in the supernatural – or rather, my disbelief in the supernatural. Incidentaly, if you think that Supernatural is a brand of petrol, this is not the book for you. I must warn anyone who is squeamish or scares easily that they’d better not read this book. Some of the things that I am going to describe would make hair stand up on Yul Brynner’s nut. I can hardly believe them myself and yet I was there. Yes! Actually there. Hold on a minute, once more my hands are beginning to shake uncontrollably. Don’t worry, the spasm will soon pass. It is just that the memory of these terrifying events is still too close for comfort. There, that’s better. Now I can start tapping the typewriter without getting my digits wedged between the keys. The question is: Where do I start? [How about at the beginning? Editor]. I am sorry about these interruptions but I have a new, young editor and he does like to get ‘involved’.

Anyway, I think the best point of departure is about the time that the Noglea Emergency Service folded. ‘Folded’ is perhaps the wrong word as I will explain later. Mention of the word Noglea may remind old readers of the existence of my brother-in-law and partner, one Sidney Noggett, Clapham’s answer to Paul Newman and husband to my sister Rosie. This was about the time, too, that Sid tried to sell the ancestral home of the Leas, 17 Scraggs Lane, to a rich Arab sheik as a hunting lodge. However, the deal fell through – at about the same time as the attic floor. It was the weight of all the wives trooping in to look into the water tank. Sid had described it as a general purpose washing machine and camel trough and was flogging it as an extra. Anyway, it ended up in Mum and Dad’s bedroom along with everybody else and that was that little deal kiboshed. It nearly cost Britain her oil supplies for a couple of months but there was nothing that a few dozen diplomatic notes and a barrel of sheeps’ eyes could not smooth over. After that incident, Sid was not a welcome visitor at Scraggs Lane despite his assurances that he’d been going to set Dad up with his own date farm on the proceeds from the sale. In fact, any mention of Sid’s name and Dad showed all his teeth and made a noise like a whistling kettle boiling over. The failure of this deal and other schemes to separate our Arab brothers from their petro-dollars – the Twelve Hour Yashmak Dry Cleaning Service is a disaster that springs readily to mind (one batch got mixed up with a twelve-hour nappy service with results too horrible to describe) – saw to it that Sid was thrown back on more conventional ways of trying to do very little with even less to make a lot. It was thus that the Noglea Emergency Service was born and I had to repaint the side of the mini-van once again: ‘Disasters are our Business’. Yes, I was a bit sceptical about it myself but whatever else Sid isn’t – and he isn’t lots of things – he is stubborn. An advert in the Yellow Pages – Sid used to think these were for Chinese restaurants and laundries – and we were in business. Quite what business I was never sure. Sid purposely wanted to keep it vague. He said that we would take on some enormous project and then ‘lay it off’, as he described it. This meant getting somebody else to do it and keeping most of the money. He said people were doing it all the time – that we would be performing an ‘entrepreneurial function’. Well, people may have been doing it all the time but we certainly weren’t. The telephone never started ringing. Sid said that it was all due to graft: the gaffers down the town hall were giving jobs to their mates and accepting kick-backs. He said he would never descend to bribery, but next week he took the town hall carpark attendant out for a sandwich and a few beers. It did not do any good though: next time we parked the van in the town hall carpark it was towed away. Sid was choked. He said that the whole edifice of British justice was crumbling and backed the van over the carpark attendant’s moped.

That was where matters stood – or rather, crouched – one evening when the telephone rang and I heard Sid’s agitated voice. ‘Timmy? Something’s come up. It could be very big. Get your mac on and I’ll pick you up in five minutes.’

He put the phone down before I had time to ask him what it was all about and think of a reason why I could not come. I crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain. Sid was not kidding about the mac. It was pouring down. Not only that but chucking great bolts of lightning about. A clap of thunder exploded overhead and I thought that it must be something promising to get Sid out on a night like this. As it so happened, I was wrong.

‘A gas leak?’ I said: ‘You must be kidding!’

Sid squinted through the wipers. ‘We’ve got to put some new rubbers in these things.’

‘Some old rubbers would do,’ I said. ‘Why do you think they make that noise? Two semi-circular pieces of glass are going to drop in our laps at any moment.’

‘Gordon Bennet,’ shouted Sid. ‘I have to do everything, don’t I? Think of the capers, find the jobs, maintain the vehicle—’

‘Tell me more about this job,’ I said, soothingly. ‘We don’t know anything about gas. How’d they get onto us?’

‘They got onto us because they saw our name in the telephone book,’ said Sid. ‘“Emergency Service”, remember? After that I boxed clever. I didn’t let on we had no practical experience of gas leaks.’

‘That was clever? Give me an example of when you’re boxing really badly.’

‘Don’t be so blooming feeble,’ said Sid. ‘All we’ve got to do is find the leak. Then one of us nips out and grabs hold of somebody to fix it. They do the work, we cop most of the mula.’

‘Enough to pay for a nice funeral, I hope,’ I said. ‘I must put my foot down at this point.’

‘Put your foot down on that fag end,’ retorted Sid, indicating a quarter inch of hand-rolled that was smouldering on the floor. ‘And not too hard. There’s only road beneath those rubber mats.’ He was not kidding. Such was the parlous state of Noglea finances that the van – our only asset – was rusting away around us. Much as I disliked the idea of searching for a gas leak I could see that even a job sexing alligators would have to be given serious consideration. The rain was still bucketing down when we found ourselves being waved to a halt by a copper with a flashlight. ‘If he asks for the MOT test we’re up the spout,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a berk,’ said Sid. ‘This is it.’

I looked through the misted-up windscreen and saw that the cops were manning a barrier that shut off one of the approach roads to an enormous block of flats. Lightning flashed and I glimpsed a crowd of people held back by a rope. Some of them were in dressing gowns and slippers, poor sods. They were shivering under umbrellas and had obviously been recently evacuated from their flats. The building itself was hardly smaller than a skyscraper and there was no sign of a light in any of the windows. Another flash and there it was, rising stark and gaunt like Cleopatra’s needle. I had the nasty feeling that we had bitten off more than we could chew.

‘Emergency Service,’ said Sid, crisply.

‘Oh yes.’ The copper’s voice sounded almost apologetic. ‘Anywhere you like, gentlemen. Do you want the crowd moved back?’

‘They’ll be all right like that, officer,’ said Sid, grandly. He wound up the window and ground the gears impressively before pulling up before the main entrance.

‘Sid,’ I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’

Sid did not have time to answer because another copper opened the door. ‘Eighteenth floor,’ he said. ‘Good luck. You’re brave men.’ I would like to have disagreed with him but he was already running towards the crowd.

‘At least we’ll be out of the wet,’ said Sid.

I felt no desire to answer that statement and accompanied Sid to the lift. We had been standing in it for a few minutes, reading the graffiti on the walls and trying not to think about the nasty smell in the corner that was definitely not gas, when we realized that the lift was of the non-mobile variety frequently found in council flats. Seventeen storeys later – or it might have been sixteen, by then my knees were beginning to lose count – we staggered into a darkened corridor and I could definitely smell gas. ‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘What a horrible pong!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sid. ‘I should never have had those pilchards after the baked beans.’

‘I wasn’t referring to that,’ I hissed. ‘We’re on the right floor. Somewhere about here is the leak.’

‘Gotcha,’ said Sid. ‘We’ll take a side each. Start hollering when your hooter delivers the goods.’ So saying, he stepped forward briskly and smashed his nut against a fire extinguisher. I was still laughing when I put my foot in a fire bucket. The corridor was dark as forgotten toast. The rain still sluicing down outside. Thunder and lightning sounding off like an artillery barrage. It was difficult to concentrate on anything except being afraid. I had never liked storms ever since I was a little boy and tried to climb into bed with Mum only to find that Dad had got there first. He explained that he was working a magic spell to make the storm go away and that I had to go back to my room or nothing would happen. I had just got to the top of the bannisters when the bed collapsed. The storm went on for another two hours. In that way children’s faith is destroyed. ‘Over here,’ called Sid. ‘Blimey, what a niff! Mind how you go, and get the windows open.’

Nostrils pressed together like the petals of a dead flower, I pushed into the room after Sid and made for the nearest window. The lights were still on in some of the neighbouring blocks and they gave enough illumination for me to dodge the furniture and see that I was in an open-plan flat with a dinette and what must be the bathroom and a bedroom leading off. I forced open the window and took a few breaths of rain for which I was not totally ungrateful, before registering a sight custom-built to raise a third seam down the front of my trousers, It emanated from a window of the flats opposite and concerned a cracking looking bird in what I believe the frogs refer to as the deshabillée or a state of Ursula Undress. She was wearing a filmy black negligée and brushing her tawny hair like she had surplus energy to burn. Behind me I could hear Sid making excited noises although over something far less exciting. ‘I think it’s down here somewhere. By the stove.’

I made a humouring ‘uhm’ noise and continued to clock the feast of feisty flesh opposite. After another half-dozen strokes the bird got bored with brushing her hair and, pushing it back over her shoulders, gracefully shrugged her way out of her negligée. Beneath it she was wearing a black bra that contributed more uplift than you would get on six weeks of Stars on Sundays and a pair of lace-trimmed black cami-knickers.

‘Timmy! I found it. Pass us the light.’ Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sid’s bum wiggling in the air and his hand groping for the torch which was somewhere behind him. I quickly decided that the sight was not worth a corner of my eye. There were better things to concentrate on. The girl had now arched her back and was unpopping her bra. My eyeballs beat her to the unpopping by a couple of seconds. What a lovely pair of bristols. She must have had strong back muscles or her nut would have cracked against something every time she bent over. She reached forward to her dressing table and picked up a jar. I don’t know what was in it but it clearly was not strawberry jam because she started massaging it into her breasts. Oh dear, nobody can understand the pain it causes me to see a woman doing a man’s job. I watched for a few more Y-front-straining moments.

‘Light!’ Sid snapped his fingers and my hand dutifully moved to my breast pocket. I don’t smoke but I am always prepared to help somebody to kill himself. The girl had now rubbed her hands over her belly and hitched her thumbs over the edge of her panties. With a delicious shimmy she wriggled them down to ankle level and stepped out of them. I wondered why it had gone misty outside and then realized that it was my breath steaming up the window pane.

‘Light!’ The niff of gas was pretty potent by this time but I was not thinking about that as I unbuttoned the pocket and pulled out the battered lighter I found on a 49 bus. I flipped back the top and pressed my finger against the flint. Opposite the bird was down to what she was born in but looking much better in it. My finger pressed tighter against the flint. I would not half of minded striking a few sparks off her. As I watched mesmerized, she straddled a chair that had its back to the dressing table and then picked up her hairbrush, but by the brush end. Curious and fascinated I leant forward eagerly. The window was starting to steam up again.

‘Light!!’ I flicked the lighter a couple of times and rubbed the window. The girl spread her legs wide and then inserted the handle of the brush through the back of the chair frame. Not only through the chair frame. Blimey! In my excitement I flicked double hard at the lighter and a flame appeared.

‘NO!!!!’

Funny, I can remember the scene as if it was yesterday. The look on Sid’s face, the smell of gas, the flame, the sudden realization that I had done something rather silly. And then – BOOM!!

CHAPTER TWO

If I have to select a moment when my relationship with Sid really started going downhill fast it must be when he came round and saw me sitting beside the bed. His eyes opened and he slowly began to focus. ‘It’s me, Sid,’ I said gently. ‘Fancy a fag?’

I suppose, on reflection, I rushed the gesture a bit. I should have guessed that he might still feel a bit touchy about the sight of my lighter stretching out towards him. Especially as he had not woken up since he last saw it. His eyes seemed to catch light and then his head jerked back so fast that his turban of bandages nearly fell off. He let out a strange strangulated cry and threw himself at my throat. It was a stupid thing to do at the best of times but doubly so with his leg in traction. Something went wrong with the balance of the weights and he was whipped up to the ceiling. Poor Sid, I did feel sorry for him. Especially after what that stupid nurse did. Rosie Dixon, I think she was called. I know she meant well but what a stupid place to leave a bed pan. If she had wanted to fiddle with the weights she should have left it underneath the bed. As it was of course – whoosh! One minute Sid is dangling over the chipped enamel, the next, everybody is locking shoulders in the swing doors. I only looked back once. I mean, you don’t need a description, do you? It was worse than when Aunty Flo nudged the chocolate blancmange into the electric fan. At least it ensured that poor Sid got a private room. In fact he said that nobody came near him for three days. They used to push the thermometer through the door wedged in the end of a cleft stick.

What was so unjust about the incident was that he blamed me for everything. It made me glad that I had taken his grapes with me when I left. Sid can be very petty sometimes. He was still sulking when he dropped in for a cup of tea at 17, Scraggs Lane. That was a few weeks later of course. After he had been discharged. He was still wearing the head bandage and I think he had begun to fancy himself in it. The wounded hero touch. It also warded off evil in the shape of Dad. Dad could hardly chuck Sid down the steps when he was convalescing. That was what Sid thought, anyway.

‘Another cup of tea, Sid?’

Sid’s hand darted over his cup. Few men can stand more than one of Mum’s cups of tea in a four or five hour period without hearing from their Newingtons. Sometimes I think of those pictures of nice Indian ladies with sheets round their heads plucking away at the leaves with the Assam hills in the background and feel glad that they don’t have to taste their handiwork once it gets into Mum’s hands. If they did they would probably chuck it all in and become snake charmers.

‘No thanks,’ said Sid. He let out a slight groan and touched the side of his bandage with an exaggerated wince.

Mum looked at him sympathetically. ‘You were unlucky weren’t you, Sid? When you think that Timmy came out of it all unscathed.’

Now the wince was genuine. Why couldn’t Mum keep her big mouth shut? Sid looked at me and I could read the expression in his eyes. If you had been slightly maimed, it said, I wouldn’t feel so bad. I’m afraid Sid is like that. Very human. ‘It’s not a subject I care to dwell on,’ he said with cold dignity, drumming his fingers on the table the while. Actually, he drummed one of them against the marmalade spoon and it jumped in the air and smeared all the way down the front of his tie, but we pretended not to notice. Sid surveyed us all with undisguised loathing. ‘I came round here to say goodbye.’