Prologue: Doctor Baldwin's Manuscript

“Now, if you’ll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the room you can see through the glass-that’s just the same as our drawing-room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair-all but the bit just behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit. I want so much to know whether they’ve a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too-but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way: I know that, because I’ve held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.”

Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll


As she sat at her small Formica desk in her study, Melanie tried to make sense out of the chaotic evidence. The soft light of an anglepoise lamp created an island of isolation, enabling her to concentrate her mind on the untidy papers and files scattered haphazardly across her desk, but any sense or meaning concerning the mystery eluded her. She rested her back against the swivel chair and chewed the end of her pen, her thoughts distracted.

Vivid in her memory was the police photograph taken from inside the labyrinth of cellars and vaults beneath Ashbury Manor as part of the investigation into the disappearance of celebrity rock guitarist, Jonathan Blake, (whose property this was) and his family. She had a copy of it, tucked away safely beneath reports collected from different sources, some official, some unofficial. The photo could have been a still from a particularly surreal horror film. The photographer had taken the picture on the other side of an enormous well or hole in the floor of a cavernous crypt. Two stone columns entwined with thick vines and bizarre brightly coloured foliage, seemingly issuing from the cavity, held a body in a cruciform position. Although emaciated, almost skeletal, like well preserved corpses from an airless tomb, one was still recognisable male, the other female-it was as if the thick, clinging greenery had sucked the very life force from their bodily frames.

Melanie then found herself looking at another photo sticking out from the thick wad of documents. She grasped its edge and gently pulled it free, staring idly at the picture of an ‘alternatively dressed’ teenager. This was Amanda Blake, daughter of the murdered Jonathan Blake; now seventeen if still alive, but when the picture had been taken nearly two years ago, a year before her disappearance, was fifteen.

She had raven black hair with purple streaks almost reaching to her waist, a round, pale and unsmiling face but with intelligent green eyes, black lipstick and pierced nose. She was wearing a tee shirt with a garish logo of a goth metal band, fronting a scene of bloody zombies arising from the graves of a desecrated church yard, and an old frayed leather jacket that went with a pentagram pendant around her neck and a brightly coloured friendship band around her wrist. A dark purple Edwardian skirt fell to her booted ankles.

The girl had been missing for nearly two years now, probably murdered like her father. The police had carried out an extensive search and the publicity in the media was intense, but so far nobody had come forward with any leads or sightings of the whereabouts dead or alive of Amanda Blake.

This extraordinarily bright adolescent had a reputation as a rebel with an unhealthy interest in the occult, heavy metal music and horror movies, but looking closer into her personal history there was nothing particular abnormal about her, except she was the daughter of a rock star. She was described as moody and at times withdrawn, she listened to cacophonous music and liked to shock. But wasn’t this normal teenage behaviour?

Rubbing her tired eyes wearily with her fingers, Melanie looked at her wristwatch and noticed nearly half an hour had passed in unfocused contemplation since she had sat down at her desk. The forces of law and order were no nearer in solving this odd and puzzling crime, so what hope did she have in playing detective. She might as well concentrate her mind on the article she was to write for the local paper; the deadline for submission was only a week away.

As Melanie switched on her computer, she suddenly decided on the spur of the moment to read through, once again, the only remnants of a mysterious manuscript before starting work. She found the photocopy at the top of the pile of documents.

This was evidence as bizarre in its own way as the disturbingly strange police photograph. Written in an almost ineligible hand, using a rather pompous and old-fashioned syntax, it was the beginnings of a long and rambling discourse. The first pages, the rest lost or consumed by flame, were found near the murder site underneath the Tudor manor house. It described things if not of a fantastical nature were certainly bordering on it, confirming the authorities assessment of the author as a lonely individual prone to mental illness and delusions of grandeur.

Nobody took this piece of evidence seriously but Melanie was drawn to it if only for the reason it may offer further clues. She picked up the photocopied sheets and began to read carefully.

When that scared young girl and her rock star father first made my acquaintance I had never really pondered the nature of evil. I mean the real nature of evil, not the mere consequences of a deeply foolish act or the results of mindless malice or hatred as bad as these are, but a self-consciously embraced metaphysic of wickedness. The studies of my former role as a historian acquainted me with all manner of foul deeds of the past, murder, rapine and mutilation, but the persons behind these awful acts were driven by unconscious impulses, hidden desires surging uncontrollable to the surface or a passion for an ideal which had blinded them to the horror they were committing, not a cool, rational, even intellectual acceptance of iniquity.

As an investigator into the paranormal and the occult I, Dr Baldwin, seek the truth and like a detective I apprehend the guilty. My efforts of research and study revolved around what you might call poltergeist activity, strange and ghostly sights in old houses and debunking the fake medium-now it is far more than this.

The depths of immorality I have had to uncover in this particular case, the nightmares, the sickening fear, the unbearable sight of depravity have only contributed to cement my commitment, to stiffen my resolve, so as to protect the unwary and the innocent.

Thus my story stands as a testament to a battle raging virtually unseen beneath the service of everyday reality but also a warning. Most will be unable to believe what I have written. Only a few perceptive persons will gain a hint of the size of the black hole devouring us all.

A terrifying chasm has been opened up.

Melanie finished reading the introductory section, a wry smile briefly animating her face. She flicked the page over and began the main narrative.

Ever since moving to Walton-on-Thames I had been fascinated by the uncanny stories connected to Ashbury Manor. It nestled like something lost from the time of Elizabeth the First amongst the non-descript, modern but leafy suburbs of South West London. Having both a personal and professional interest in the supernatural it was just waiting to exert its influence on my imagination.

How was I to know that what started out as a mild diversion from my other concerns at the time was to shatter my life for good.

I had decided to purchase a small terraced house in Walton mainly because it was near my place of work (l lecture part-time at Kingston University about five miles distant) and was well populated and near enough to London for my own personal practice-Baldwin’s, Private Investigator of the Paranormal and Occult Sciences. For twenty years I had lived in the town of Ulverston in Cumbria where I made a meagre living out of writing academic works on folk beliefs and the occult. It was here that I decided upon the path of investigator, having an important but minor role in the arrest of the notorious black magician Charles Marlowe. Marlowe as everyone knows was a practitioner of the esoteric arts, a writer on the subject as well as a mass murderer. His elaborate occult theories were intrinsically linked to his motives and that is why I was invaluable to the police.

Now here I was in a new town and I must admit that I found it totally lacking in the roots connecting it to the dark past; so the first thing I do, yes I admit, to cheer myself up, is visit the library to uncover a bit of lurking ancient history. It was the worst mistake of my life.

At first the library only confirmed my suspicions about the place. It was your typical suburban branch containing a very limited supply of material; trashy popular fictions from romance to ridiculous sci-fi, a children’s section all decorated in garish colours in a desperate attempt to entice the little tykes from the TV screen and their computers, and god forbid even DVD’s and CD’s, representing what was the most awful in today’s culture; Hollywood and pop music. What had happened to the art of reading I asked myself? Of course tucked away you found your classic 19^th century novel, the odd scholarly history tome (not to be confused with the populist tripe clogging up the history shelves) and would you believe it some readable and well-researched books on the paranormal and the supernatural, which was not your usual sensationalist garbage.

I went straight to the local history section and my heart sank. It seemed to me that as far as Walton-on-Thames was concerned history began only when the railway arrived in the Victorian period. For hundreds of years the area had been a conservative farming community which had witnessed some excitement during the turbulent period of the English Civil War.

But I was not to be deterred, I am a delver into the murkier parts of time after-all. I dug through the albums of tedious old photographs and scrapbooks by local non-entities from the last two hundred years, until I found what I was later to discover was a gem of blackest hue. It was a small book written in the 1920’s by the late Sir William Barrett. Its title was simply ‘The Dark Past of Ashbury Manor.’

I knew of Sir William Barrett, an eccentric business man, landowner and amateur historian, writer of many obscure historical pamphlets from the 1900’s until his mysterious death in 1929. I had come across him when as a young man at Oxford I was doing research for my Masters degree on the Tudor aristocracy. Barrett’s early work on the Elizabethan era was well respected by serious scholars of the period but he had fallen out with the academic profession with his later writings. The tatty reprint of 1978 I held in my hands was from the later period.

In the mid 1970’s when I was a postgraduate I held only a passing interest in the occult otherwise I would have been tempted to delve further into the last years of Sir William’s life. All I knew of the shadowy side to William Barrett’s life was his purchasing of an Elizabethan manor house in a south-east town close to London and his move had marked the unbalancing of his mental stability. According to most of his academic colleagues, his pamphlets from then on increasingly showed an overactive interest in ghosts, witchcraft, demonology and especially the complex brand of mysticism connected to the Judaic faith called the Kabbalah.

The manner of his dying stuck particularly in my mind as it would anybody’s. His death had proven to his distracters that he had indeed been mad. His emaciated and decomposing body was discovered in one of the rooms of the manor after he had been missing for over six months. Grotesquely on examination the pathologist found he had begun to eat the flesh of his own hands. Ultimately they came to a grim conclusion; he had deliberately locked himself into a secret room and starved himself to death. But the housekeeper was certain she had heard no cries or even the rooms’ existence.

On seeing the name of Sir William Barrett this came back to me and I must admit I felt a thrill of excitement. So it was Walton-on-Thames that he had come to reside in and his place of abode was Ashbury Manor. Walton did have its history and as I was to read later in the comfort of my own study an extremely sinister one.

I read ‘The Dark History of Ashbury Manor’ in one sitting that very evening. I thought the book fascinating but I have to admit at this juncture I found it only pleasantly ‘spooky,’ rather then horrifying.

It begins with a short account of the founding of the manor in 1564 by an obscure religious sect, originally situated in the northern town of Lancaster. They had fled from fierce popular anger aimed at their unusual spiritual beliefs and rumoured practices. As far as Sir William can gather their doctrines were Gnostic in origin and there was evidence that they had ancestral links with the heretical Cathars wiped out by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages.

They were lead by a man called George Browne, an architect and a mason, a close friend of the most prominent landowner of the area. The landowner whose name passes me by gave Mr Browne and his followers some land in which to farm and provided some of the funds to build a large communal house overlooking the Thames, which came to be called Ashbury Manor. The Manor was designed by George Browne but was modelled on your average Tudor manor house, although the interior was decidedly odd-as I was about to find out. I won’t go into details now but you will understand as my narrative unfolds that the word odd is very much an understatement.

The settling of this cult amongst the deeply conservative and god-fearing villagers of Walton-on-Thames was bound to cause friction but nothing to suggest the horrific act of violence that was to engulf this tiny rural community on Halloween night of 1573.

As early as a year before the coming of the group, the Parson of St Mary’s had officially petitioned the local landowner against the blasphemous rabble, mentioning in passing that such a settlement of people would result in the stiffest resistance from the populace, the Church and the authorities.

It was not long after their arrival that wild rumours circulated around the vicinity; they shared their women in common and held orgiastic rites, worshipped the devil, and most ghastly of the lot, they sacrificed young children to their evil god by bricking them up alive in the walls of Ashbury Manor.

But the parson failed with his plea to the authorities as they remained indifferent, the Church did their best but lost interest when the secular authorities did not want to take action and as the group kept to themselves and rarely ventured out of their compound, the populace soon forgot about them.

But in the summer of 1573 the area was hit by bad harvests. This coincided with the desecration of St Mary’s Church when vandals placed obscene carvings on the altar, followed in the autumn by the mysterious disappearance of a young child from nearby. Things came to a head on Halloween night when singing, chanting and general merry-making emanating from the Manor was reported to the Parson. A crowd of villagers soon gathered lead by the Parson and marched on the Manor.

What followed was an act of mob violence unprecedented in this sleepy corner of Surrey. According to the tracts of the time which are vague to say the least, the occupants of Ashbury Manor were caught engaged in acts of vile debauchery. This was the last straw as far as the mob was concerned who blamed the bad harvests, the desecration of the Church and the disappearance of the youngster on the occupants.

They were forcibly dragged, men, women and children, into a nearby field were they were viciously cut-down by a crude collection of farm implements wielded by the peasants of Walton. Presided over by the Parson their bodies were ceremoniously burnt; some reports say that the Waltonites danced around the bonfires screaming and shouting in ecstasy and blood lust.

There were no repercussions against the Parson or the villagers and the whole grisly incident was almost totally forgotten. Strangely the local residents did not vent their anger on the Manor and left the place intact. It was sold a year later by the landowner to a merchant family from London.

　

The next couple of paragraphs of the manuscript were unreadable, besmirched with a large black burn mark in the middle of the page. Melanie when she had first began to read Dr Baldwin’s story had even found the last passages difficult to read as they were pock marked as if with rust. But she now carried on her reading quite easily as she was familiar with its contents.

Sir William in the concluding parts of his booklet writes about the peculiar nature of the interior architecture which I was to experience first hand; visitors to the building could feel disorientated and on some occasions lose their way, afterwards talking about passageways and chambers that were not there. The disquieting paranormal activity encountered by past residents, the sudden rises in temperature experienced in some of the rooms and the feeling of dread and unease produced only on certain days of the year were also discussed.

At the end of his little tome Sir William says he has unearthed some hefty writings on Cabalistic occult theory by the founder of Ashbury Manor, George Browne. Writings which and I quote, “have produced terrible conflicting feelings of fear and trepidation on the one hand, feelings that have brought me actual sympathy, horrible though it may be to admit it, with that Elizabethan parson and his ignorant flock and on the other emotions of fascination, excitement and even joy, activated in the dedicated historian by his art of uncovering secrets not meant for Christian mortals. I have made up my mind to continue with my research and dam the consequences.”

From then onwards Sir William Barrett’s later work was to heavily concentrate on the darkest side of the supernatural, leading eventually to his banishment from the academic community of historians and maybe the unhinging of his mind.

I finished reading just after midnight and I was consumed with curiosity. I had to get my hands on the work of George Browne mentioned in Sir William’s tract. The item should not be too arduous to find, even if it meant a visit to the British Library. But first I meant to take a look at the centre of this weird story which was not a difficult task as the Manor was only a walk away from my house.

The next evening was clear but breezy, like it had been throughout July, when I walked down the towpath beside the Thames towards Molesey. I turned after passing the Rose Garden and recreation ground, following a narrow well-heeled residential street until I got to the hill.

Near the top the hill was blocked by a moss-covered and rather dilapidated brick wall that curved

round its edge. In its centre was a modern looking gate, which I assumed opened and shut electronically, contrasting with the vine-entangled and lichen infested old stone posts on either side. I looked up the long driveway through the iron railings of the gate and as the full moon was shining directly above, although occasionally covered by clouds, I could make out Ashbury Manor on the top of the rise.

There were no streetlights here and the Manor had very little artificial illumination of its own so without the moon it would have been just a black indistinct blob. But now I could make out a large timber framed Elizabethan manor house, two floors high with two wings attached to its central section, its stone slated roof and three chimneys crooked and uneven. On first acquaintance due to the effect of the evening light, the building had the unsettling appearance of an ugly and squat toads head.

I could not make out its garden because on the right side of the drive was a high hedge. Tall sycamore trees grow like an organic wall to one side of the property enclosing the grounds in dark shadows; if you looked closely small bats fluttered in and out of the eaves of the house. There was some lighting coming from the garages on the left. The second garage door was open and through the indistinct light of a hanging bulb I could make out the aerodynamic lines of a black BMW with its bonnet up. A shapeless figure was bending over the automobile tinkering with its engine.

My eyes moved to the house again and they were caught by another. Beneath the eaves of the right-wing of the house, seemingly to stare directly at me out of an illuminated window, which a few moments before had not been lit-up, was a girl of about fifteen or sixteen years of age. Her stare, frightened and helpless I thought at the time, sent a jolt through my frame like electricity. This girl was Amanda who was going to play a major part in my life. I quickly moved away, guiltily feeling like a voyeur and retired to the nearby pub, the Old Manor Inn.

In the pub which was oldy-worldy, compact and cosy with an ageing clientele, I got talking to the middle-aged barman. He told me, rather derisively I thought, that the Manor had recently been purchased by Jonathan Blake, the lead guitarist of the famous ‘goth-rock’ band ‘Blood Moon.’ He along with his new lover and his daughter had moved in that day.

I admitted to the barman that I had never heard of the group, being a self-confessed hater of rock music. The barman concurred and he started to talk about the recent history of the old house that I could just glimpse rising above the roofs from the open doorway of the inn. The light was still shinning from that forlorn window like a weak signal of distress. Ashbury Manor had remained deserted since the 1930’s, the barman continued to tell me, when the last owner, an eccentric recluse and a professor or academic of some kind (Sir William Barrett, I informed him), had committed suicide. Afterwards no one would buy the Manor, not even the National Trust and the place fell into ruin. The house was considered haunted and even kids who are usually attracted to abandoned buildings shunned it. According to stories told around the common room of the homeless hostel in Kingston, vagrants unlucky enough to squat there had stayed no longer then one night, too traumatized to speak of what they had witnessed.

Local residents reported seeing eldritch lights glowing from top story windows and spine chilling noises issuing from the grounds in the dead of night, even spectral figures moving in sinister fashion downstairs, glimpsed through the open wound of the entrance. As recently as a month ago the building contractors and landscape gardeners, employed by the new residents, had been reluctant to work because of the place’s reputation, delaying the renovation for weeks. The front garden was still in a chaotic shape untouched since the early part of the century.

I was thinking all the while how I could get permission to see Ashbury Manor from the inside. The best option would be to introduce myself to the Blake’s by knocking on their front door, but being celebrities this could be difficult. The next few weeks I conducted further research into the old dwelling and came up with two disturbing pieces of information. Then Amanda Blake with her father arrived in a distraught state at my house…

The sound of rain hitting the window of Melanie’s study distracted her attention, but she had finished reading what remained of the manuscript and throw it back on to the desk. Nothing more had come to her during her perusal of the document and her eyes were growing heavy with tiredness.

The wind was gusting harder then it had been a few minutes ago and her gate that lead to the side entrance of her house was rattling nervously, opening and shutting. She stared at her reflection thrown by the lamp in the rain spattered pane, unable to see anything outside but a twitching limb of the apple tree, close up against the glass. Her neck felt stiff and she massaged it gently, groaning at the lateness of the hour.

Stretching languorously, letting out a deep yawn, she stood up and went into the hall meaning to get her raincoat and to step out into the unruly weather to secure her gate. She could hear it from here, its motion creating a rhythmic counterpoint to the rushing rain filled wind, but this sound was suddenly driven from her mind by the shrill ringing of her telephone.

Picking up the receiver, idly wondering who this could be at one in the morning, Melanie heard the instantly recognisably voice of the editor of the Surrey Gazette, the paper she worked for, dead-pan and weary

“Hi, this is Mike; I have someone here sitting with me you will be very interested in.”

For the first few seconds, Melanie was taken aback unable to find anything to say, but she quickly rallied.

“It better be someone interesting, calling me at this time of night. So who is this mystery person you have with you.”

There was a silence for a few brief moments in which time Melanie heard the rain intensify.

“Amanda Blake,” Mike said.