‘How about this one, then?’

​

Danny was desperately trying to unearth some enthusiasm in the shed. His neck ached from reading emails on his laptop screen for too long. Evelyn stared into her phone as if it were an electronic crystal ball. Ciarán gazed blankly ahead, watching Danny in a manner that was more than a little disturbing. An autumn wind buffeted the simple wooden structure, and blew fallen leaves past the small and slightly grubby window.

 

‘Dear Danny and team. I grew up in a pub in Gravesend, and at night, after the place was closed, a headless horseman rode through the bar from the pool room…’

 

‘Not another bloody headless horseman.’ Evelyn didn’t even bother to look up from her phone where she was immersed in a study of amorphic apparition theory.

 

Ciarán sighed softly and continued to stare through Danny as if he were not there.

 

‘Well, how about this one?’ Danny quickly scanned through the next email. ‘Danny, every morning I am woken by the touch of silken hair across my face, and the strong smell of womanhood as the beautiful…’ Danny coughed, read a few more words. ‘I think we can give that one a miss, for a family show anyway.’

 

‘They’re all shite.’ Mike muttered, almost forgotten in his dark corner of the shed. He had his headphones on as always, and never heard anything at the best of times anyway. Danny assumed it was in response to something their eccentric sound engineer was listening to, rather than a reasoned critique of this week’s selection of emails. He opened the next email, perhaps the fiftieth or sixtieth. He had lost count over an hour ago.

 

‘Danny, Evelyn, or I think that’s what it says, and Karen. One night when I was at university, me and my mates dared each other to walk home through the graveyard after a night out, and…’

 

‘Can’t do graveyards and students anymore. Not for the BBC.’ Evelyn continued reading from her phone as her disembodied voice sent another email into the electronic wastebasket. ‘Culturally inappropriate, and health & safety, and alcohol misuse.’

 

Danny quickly skimmed through two more, wishing that Ciarán would find somewhere else to look, but having worked with him for years, he knew that when those vacant, sad eyes fixed on a point in the room, they wouldn’t move for hours.

 

The next one caught his eye. Something about it spoke to him that this might be the one they were looking for. He read it through to the end, and felt the thrill of a new case emerging from the badly typed words.

 

‘This is more like it,’ he said to himself rather than the other occupants of the shed. ‘Dear Danny and the teem. We movd into a large old house with the intenton of doing it up, but we canot get any tradesmen to work in the house, because they have either herd that it is haunted, or they dont come back after a day or two. I know old houses can make strange noises, but that cannot possibbly explain what we have experienced since moving here just over a yer ago.’

Danny looked up to see if anybody was even listening. Evelyn continued to read on her phone. Ciarán stared ahead blankly, and as always, it was hard to tell if he was even awake, or if he had drifted into some sort of paranormal coma.

 

‘The house is mostly Victorian,’ Danny continued, ‘but stands on the site of an even older house, bilt when the priory was ransacked by Henry VIII. That is what we have been told by locl people, and that fits with the aparitions we have seen that definitely look like a monk from a long time ago.’

Danny looked up from his laptop screen again. Ciarán sighed as if all hope had finally been lost. Evelyn swiped at her screen. Without knowing if they had even heard a word he had said, he went back to the email.

 

‘Objects move for no reson, and omanents have been broken by being vilently thrown around rooms, even during the day when we are watching. I think this would be a good case for Uncanny, and if you visiit the house, you will see for yourslf because these things happn nerly evry day. Many thanks. Marjorie Poorley.’

Danny looked around the shed, but there was still no reaction from either Evelyn or Ciarán, so he added: ‘PS. If you visit the house, I promise to bake you some nice cakes.’

 

‘I think we should visit.’ Evelyn said, putting down her phone.

 

‘What sort of cakes?’ Ciarán’s eyes were instantly alive.

 

‘That’s the right answer guys,’ Danny said, ignoring all discussion of cakes. ‘Something about this one just sounds genuine.’

 

‘Probably some sort of sponge, Ciarán said quietly to himself. ‘But that’s okay, and it might even have jam and cream inside.’

 

‘Where is this place?’ Evelyn asked, her reading forgotten like yesterday’s chip paper.

 

‘Doomlake Priory, somewhere in Suffolk,’ Danny read from the bottom of the email.

 

‘Where the hell is Suffolk?’ Ciarán asked. Like most people, he had heard of it, but couldn’t point to it on a map.

 

‘It’s near Wales, isn’t it?’ Evelyn thought out loud. ‘There will be witchcraft in that ancient land, and mysterious ley lines with spirit portals and…’

 

‘Okay, well according to this we drive North out of London, head out towards the sea, underneath Norfolk.’ Danny said, having dumped the postcode into Google Maps.

 

‘Do we have to take him?’ Ciarán indicated the scruffy figure huddled under headphones in the corner.

 

‘Oh God, no,’ Evelyn sighed quietly. ‘I can do the sound, honest. Just get me a recording machine, a modern one that actually works, and one of those stupid furry microphone things.’

 

‘We’ve been through this before,’ Danny explained patiently. ‘We have to take him. Union rules and all that.’

 

‘But he’s so bloody miserable.’ Evelyn complained. ‘It’s like carrying your own death sentence around.’

 

‘I can hear you, you know,’ Mike said, a lot louder than was really necessary, as people do when wearing double-insulated noise-cancelling headphones.

 

‘How the hell did he hear that?’ Ciarán whispered. ‘He never hears anything you actually say to him.’

 

‘I heard that too.’ Mike grinned, his missing front tooth like a vanished tombstone in his unshaven face. He pointed at the furry microphone on top of the filing cabinet next to him and tugged at the cable that disappeared into his ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder.

 

‘If we’re going out, to like, mingle with the public, are you going to get your bloody hair cut?’ Evelyn asked.

 

Danny flicked his fingers through his hair defensively. ‘What’s wrong with my hair?’

 

‘Seriously?’ Evelyn looked at him with wide eyes. ‘You mean you like it looking like that?’

 

‘Like what?’ Danny looked around for a mirror, realising he didn’t have one in his shed, as Evelyn returned to her phone.

 

Finally having a case to investigate, they made plans for visiting the isolated house, somewhere near nowhere, down a lane in the sleepy arable lands of Suffolk. They met at Danny’s house on the following Saturday morning, and when everything was loaded into the car, set off to do battle with the London traffic. Once past the M25, they made good progress along the A12.

 

‘When are we stopping for lunch?’ came a sad and hungry sounding voice from the back seat.

 

‘Bloody hell Ciarán, we’ve only been driving for just over an hour.’ Danny looked at the sat-nav and saw that they would arrive at lunchtime, and arriving with a hungry Ciarán would result in a lot of whingeing, so he started looking out for somewhere to feed the crew. They stopped for fast food that turned out to be remarkably slow food on a busy Saturday lunchtime, then got back on the road towards Ipswich.

 

‘Did you know that Ipswich is a really ancient town?’ Evelyn said as they passed the signs for the ring road. ‘It is one of the oldest towns in Britain, and was the scene of great slaughter during the Viking invasions.’

 

‘You’re going to tell me it was once full of witches,’ Danny said, ‘hence the name.’

 

‘No, actually. The name Wich, in this case, comes from the Old English term Wyc, meaning a port or bay.’

 

‘Oh, that’s really interesting. I didn’t realise you knew so much about place names.’

 

‘I don’t.’ Evelyn waved her phone at him. ‘I just looked it up on Wikipedia.’

 

They continued along the A12 until the sat-nav told them to take a turning onto a smaller road, then onto an even smaller road. Gradually, they left civilisation behind, and Danny drove his sensible and economical Toyota Prius carefully along the narrow country lanes, somewhere west of Framlingham.

 

‘Can you not go a wee bit faster?’ Evelyn asked from the front passenger seat, irritated at how slowly the scenery was passing by. She had lost service on her phone twenty seconds ago and was already bored.

 

‘I don’t want to miss the turning.’ Danny looked again at the sat-nav. They should be almost there.

 

‘Go any slower and you’ll miss Hogmanay,’ Evelyn muttered to herself. ‘And it’s still only bloody October.’

 

‘Lack of sleep can create the illusion of time passing more slowly,’ Ciarán said from behind Evelyn, who was now waving her phone around to see if she could find some service.

 

‘We must have driven past it,’ Danny said, the sat-nav having given up trying to find anything on this empty road.

 

‘I think this’ll be it here on the left,’ Evelyn said, her now useless phone forgotten, as a pair of moss and ivy covered stone pillars appeared in the overgrown trees next to the lonely road. Rusted iron gates hung precariously from their hinges, gates that hadn’t moved in more than a century. Even the fallen autumn leaves managed to look neglected, and the eerie darkness of the shaded driveway that vanished amongst the trees reminded them that Halloween was less than a month away.

 

‘Of course, an entrance like this creates a preconditioning of the natural fear reflex.’ Ciarán explained from the back seat.

 

‘It’s all shite anyway,’ Mike said loudly from under his headphones next to Ciarán, clutching his scruffy microphone to him like a captured pet.

 

Danny turned the Prius into the forbidding driveway, the damp rotting of autumn decay enfolding the car as it explored deeper into the trees. After perhaps a quarter of a mile, the drab grey stone of a vast gabled house appeared out of the gloom like a wraith. Bare branches like skeletons reached out almost to the black slate roof, and a mist hung still in the depression that surrounded the house. All the windows were dark, as if the house itself had died.

 

Danny parked the car, and all that was left was silence.

​

​

 

End of Part One.

Next episode: The Priory.