Embers in the dying fire glowed hot-orange with the flurry of activity in front of the centuries-old stone hearth. Muddied-up footwear was hurriedly placed over dried socks, while supportive shots of Jägermeister were passed around by head barman Tony Wilson (Geoff Boycott demurred). Unlike the footwear of his companions, Smith’s Freeman, Hardy & Willis-bought lace-ups showed little sign of wear and tear. He’d taken the shortest route to Hangingbrow Hall, although it hadn’t been an easy ride. Having plunged down a cliff-face in a Vauxhall VX saloon with his now-disappeared roadie and scaffolder acquaintance Rob Carroll, a brusque 15-minute twig-cracking stomp had brought him to the hall’s dishevelled grounds and an unlikely meeting with Factory Records chief Wilson.
Smith, however, was feeling some discomfort. With the plum job of hearth/fire attendant, his soles, which had remained tied to his feet upon drifting to sleep, had been directly facing the heat source for some time and were now like a pair of small pizza ovens.
“Ooh-yaa,” Smith hopped.
“What’s wrong?” called Wilson. “Dead leg?”
“No, shoes are ’ot,” Smith grunted.
Wilson glanced down at his own ruined, sodden, muddied Nike high-tops and wished he had similar problems.
With a keen grin, Brian Clough made it first to the foot of the wide, carpeted staircase, convinced there was nothing more teeth-chatteringly frightening to face than a nervous squatter who’d been disturbed as he went about his ablution-free existence. Boycott approached, anguished, mouth set like granite: “It’s a right buggeroo this, Brian.”
Clough lifted an accusing finger to his friend: “Now you should know better,” he scalded. “Did you see anything unusual when you were out on your spook trail earlier? The answer to that is ‘no’.”
“Well, there were this big bump sound,” Boycott asserted. “That were unnervin’ bit abart it all.”
“I’ll give you a big bump in a minute,” Clough derided. “Snap out of it. This lot are looking to you and me for answers and direction. This is our bread and butter. Cos if any of this gets out, press’ll make mincemeat of you. They’ll say you’ve lost the plot!”
Smith soon joined them, glass of Jägermeister still on the go. “How d’yer do,” he smirked. “Will you sign an autograph for me?” – and he laughed.
Boycott nodded at Clough: “You’re right, Brian. We’re in middle of a Looney Tunes cartoon ’ere. There’s ’omeless, destitute fella upstairs, I’m convinced of it narr. He might ’ave some food we can pilfer.”
“It must be a down-on-his-luck Olympic sprinter then,” Peter O’Toole breathlessly mentioned as he stepped forward, running his hands through his hair as if he was readying himself for a scrum on a churned-up rugby field. “Allan bloody Wells in clogs, getting in a bit of practise before Los Angeles. Faster than shit through a tin horn!”
“His middle name’s Wipper,” Smith mentioned.
“Who?” asked Tim Healy, squinting.
“Allan Wells, sprinter,” Smith answered.
“Wippy? “Boycott frowned. “Like ice-cream man? Are you makin’ up stories, yer daft striplin’?”
“It’s a good fact Mark, but possibly not the right time,” an avuncular Wilson cut in. “And we’re about to come face-to-face with an errant spirit with, you would imagine, very little interest in modern British athletics. But I could be wrong.”
“Without going over old ground Mr O’Toole, I’m starting to find all this phantom-flinging a bit of an inconvenience,” Clough expressed. “Worst of all, I don’t think you believe any of this tosh either but you’ve got a mischievous streak, I can see that. What I’m saying is, let’s not bloody milk this one.”
“Cloughie, Brian, my dear friend, we’re merely wishing our neighbour a good morning and apologising for the inconvenience!” O’Toole smiled. “Let’s take a cup of sugar up as a gesture of goodwill and compliance.”
A fresh collection of candles were handed out and lit. If there had been a film camera at the summit of the staircase, the director would have seen six eager faces, from left, Clough, Boycott, Smith, Wilson, O’Toole and Healy, all looking upwards into the lens.
The scene then became reminiscent of the start of the Grand National – and they’re off! Twelve legs attacked the magenta-carpeted stairs, puffs of dust rising from the well-fitted surface as they ascended. From the landing, up among ornate dark-timber arches, the main hall’s dimensions beneath seemed to constrict, while the rising odour of the log fire added a strange and not unwelcome homeliness.
The bunch hurried along like doctors in a Seventies big-budget US hospital drama, judging on the hoof the direction that the mysterious tramp or ghoul must have toddled. They barged open doors, finding little except abandoned items of furniture and light fittings festooned in cobweb decoration. As with the ground floor. some electric switches worked, most didn’t. Bulbs that were functioning were so dirt-encrusted that they may as well have been absent.
Smith switched to a cod-American accent: “Obscure and metaphysical explanation to cover a phenomenon. Reasons dredged from the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained. Call it parallel planes or just in-san-ity-uh. Whatever it is, find it… in… The Twilight Zone-uh! Ha-ha-ha! That was on other night. It was about doppelgängers trying to kill their lookalikes. Interesting stuff, good ideas.”
“You musn’t worry about doppelgängers, darling,” Wilson smiled, patting Smith’s shoulders. “They broke the mould when they created you.”
There was a bedroom – the master bedroom, presumably – with a four-poster pushed up against a wall, two dark-wood wardrobes and a set of drawers, the latter of which was found to contain clothes and underwear, men’s and women’s, all neatly tucked away, all from decades ago. Curtains were drawn across wide windows, trapping Hangingbrow Hall in a never-ceasing night from which it could not awaken. By the underpants O’Toole discovered a book, The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. He waved it in the air. “Antisemitic text dating from before the First World War that purported to lay out Jewish plans for world domination,” he reported. “Hitler’s bible. A great stack of untruths – dangerous stuff.” He pushed the copy into Wilson’s hands, who replied, “I read it when I was 12.”
“Not even the Three Bears have tried that mattress out,” Clough noted. “I don’t know what Goldilocks will make of all this.”
O’Toole slid the drawer shut. “Curious that our own displaced resident, whom we are yet to meet, could make little use of the complimentary wardrobe or cantankerous reading material on offer,” he noted.
“I cannae understand this at all, y’knaa,” Healy said, scratching the back of his head, eyes widening. “We’re in a fantastical museum.”
Perplexed, they departed the bedroom and trudged further along the passageway. A white-painted door, shielded by darkness, was the furthest extent of the corridor. O’Toole, leading the gang, paused. The door and what lay beyond it felt somehow extraordinarily sinister. Clough glanced across at Healy in a condemnatory manner: the trouble you have caused!
“What’s the bloody hold up?” Clough barked. “Get in there!”
O’Toole took hold of the handle. The door creaked: Wrrrrrrr-aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!
“Nothing a bit of oil won’t fix,” Healy said, making light of the nerve-shredding seriousness.
One by one, they filed into the large space, breaths trailing. Instantly, they noted that the temperature felt farcooler than the rest of the house – if that were possible. In the candle gloom rows of skeletal single beds matted in dust were observed – a dormitory, yet there were no blankets to be seen. Tim Healy flicked the light, but there was no bulb in the fitting. Shadows conspired on the walls.
“It could do with a radiator or two installing in here,” Smith reasoned. “Central heating. It’s got an exterior wall on two sides, and there’s your problem. Me grandad were a plumber, y’know. He had a big shop near Strangeways. A real pragmatist. He’d have had a solution for this room.”
By the curtains stood a dappled rocking horse that once would have looked down over the home’s previously attractive grounds. On a desk was a lone bottle of Parker Quink fountain-pen ink. A tiddlywinks board game and a chess set sat on a shelf. A wind-up steam locomotive with two carriages on an oval track took up a whole low table. On the floor, near the horse, a doll’s house was spotted, which was fully stocked with miniature furniture.
As the six scattered about the room, they each noted, one by one, a ventriloquist’s dummy perched upright on a lone chair. It was child-sized and wore a dapper tweed suit. It had the regulation terrifyingly jovial expression, with blue eyes and an elongated mouth that was U-shaped with mirth. Its upper class neat hair was styled in a side-parting. A circular nose was red and shiny, as was its tongue behind those stretched lips. Limp by its sides were white podgy hands, life-like and glossy.
O’Toole’s bared his teeth as he realised the dummy wasn’t dusty and that it had black-painted wooden shoes. He touched the hair on its head and the head felt strangely warm.
As O’Toole gazed into the face of the unfathomably clean figure, Smith suddenly pulled his head back as if suffering from an instant violent migraine, before lurching forward, growling and twisting like a man deranged.
“He’s ’avin’ a fit!” Boycott cried. “Daft as ’e is, we’ll ’ave to mind ’im till it passes. It’ll be all that boozin’ ’e gets up to.”
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Smith responded, lifting a hand into the air as he caught his breath. He seemed cured of his ailment but then the writhing and gyrating started afresh. He rocked, head in hands, swinging back and forth, wailing in torment.
“Maybe the drink was off,” Healy uttered. “He sunk a fair few. So that means… maybe…”
“We’re all for a bout if that’s the case,” O’Toole glumly stated.
“I shun’t be too bad then flower,” Boycott said. “I only ’ad a nip.”
Smith froze. His eyes began swivelling. Rapid head movement followed as if he was a detective piecing together a complicated murder mystery. “I’ve got it now,” he proclaimed. “I’ve seen what happened.”
“Got what?” Wilson queried. “Rabies?”
“Uh-uh,” Smith said, shaking his head. “Remember what I said in the Haçienda last week?”
“About your connections with MI5 and MI6?” Wilson frowned. “I thought that was mostly bollocks, but, y’know, print the legend.”
“Nah, nah, nah…” Smith returned. “The other thing.”
“What, the psychic stuff?” Wilson added. “Again, I never took much notice… Anyway, it’s like you mentioned, what good’s being psychic and knowing that the bus is going to be half an hour late.”
“Whoaaa, some ’eavy stuff went on ’ere, cocker,” Smith said, touching his forehead with his fingertips, thinking, thinking, thinking. “So, fella who lived here, right… killed a woman and some kids. He lured them here. Did away with them the first night they arrived. I think O’Toole’s got something. This place is haunted. A real psycho once lived here.”
Clough knelt down by the doll’s house to take a closer inspection of the tiny furniture’s intricate detailing. Despite the wild conversations occurring around him, he became transfixed by the mini home and looked in disbelief at one of the first-floor rooms. In it, four figures were hanging by the neck with sewing thread from a gallows. The Nottingham Forest manager was dumbstruck, yet he still couldn’t allow himself to believe that anything happening was beyond the realm of science and reason.
“Someone with a very odd sense of humour has run amok in this room,” Clough said, getting to his feet. “A prankster, someone with too much time on their bloody hands. A footballer, perhaps. Cos I don’t think you can buy toys like that from Fisher Price.”
Wilson bent down to view the scaled-down scene of horror and waved Smith across to join him.
It was while Smith was on his knees, lip curled in disgust, that an almighty VLAAAAAMMMM was heard from behind. It was apparent that the door to the landing had closed shut as if caught in the middle of a hurricane.
“I told you this ’ouse were draughty,” Boycott chimed. “It could do wi’ some of them long snakes and sausage dogs to stop air shiftin’ abart.”
Boycott attempted to re-open the door to the landing but there came a whipcrack of electricity from the handle and the cricketer quickly withdrew, flapping his hand. “By Jiminy, it’s wired up to mains!”
At that moment, a closet door opened with a loathsome screech and as it reached its widest point, a blast of icy air issued at force from the space and blew out all the candles as if it were the breath of a child at a birthday party.
Smith sensibly waited for a repeat gust, but once satisfied that the incident was a one-off, he struck a match and re-lit candles from outstretched hands. A welcome yellow glow returned to the room.
The sight hit them instantly and mouths gaped with shock and confusion. Red lettering was daubed on the wall, six-feet tall.
GET OUT.
“Not very welcoming,” O’Toole mused.
“It’s Akzidenz-Grotesk,” Wilson recognised. “A German font dating from the late 1890s. A little overused if we’re being unkind. A bit of a cliché.”
Waaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh! Just then, the main door to the landing suddenly unlocked itself and opened invitingly.
“Well, y’knaa, I think we should leave,” said Healy smartly. “Like the nice evil spirit said.”
“Eh, cut that out,” Clough warned with a vexed-red face, and he scrutinised the room looking for cameras, electrical devices, spying equipment, anything that could be used to frighten the living daylights out of a gang of unsuspecting passers-by. He then turned his attention to O’Toole and barked out instructions as if he were on the touchline of a training-session match. “We don’t need hysteria at the smallest turn of events,” he chided. “We need reasoning, a bit of rest, and we’ll be able to think things through that much clearer.”
“But the words on the wall!” O’Toole wheezily croaked and waved ostentatiously towards them. “A message for us. Communication from the dead. Perhaps from Hitler himself!”
“I don’t think he spoke much English, bonny lad,” Healy replied. “Would it not be in his mother tongue, like?”
“GEH RAUS, that would be,” Wilson helpfully revealed. “Top of the year in German, De La Salle Grammar. But you knew that already.”
Smith appeared truculent. “Too many chief swans here for my liking,” he voiced. “Sooner we’re on the march, the better.”
“Pity we didn’t run into a vicar when we were out last night and not actors,” Boycott voiced. “I wonder what a man of the cloth would make of all this.”
“Probably tell you it was all a load of bloody rubbish, just like I’m telling you now!” Clough furiously replied. He turned his head towards Smith. “You,” he pointed, “go and see what’s in that closet, quick as your legs can carry you! Then we can get ourselves back to what’s left of the fire and get some bloody shuteye.”
“Would you believe, this isn’t the worst day I’ve had this week,” Wilson summarised. “It’s only the second-worst. I had a fucker of a row with Rob Gretton on Wednesday, the New Order manager – over money as usual.”
As Smith approached the wide-open closet door, his shoes gently tapping the floorboards, he noticed a pale light emitting from its depths. He slowed but was soon halted in his tracks as, through the gap, a huge glowing skull-like face emerged and launched itself into the room using boney stilt arms for movement. It roared so loudly and with such bass-laden lion force that Smith’s hair flapped about his ears. Beams of grey light fired out of its black eye sockets and bashed Smith squarely in the chest, almost knocking him off his feet. Rather than turn and run, like any sane person would have done, Smith instead balled up on the floor and shouted, “Is that the best you can do, you soft bastard?”
“Told you we’d see a big moosehead if we meddled!” Boycott barked. “Sometimes it’s best to leave well alone!”
O’Toole looked across to the ventriloquist’s dummy and noted that it’s smile seemed more intense.
Smith was pulled from the closet’s threshold and the clutches of the luminescent monster by the deft fingers of Clough and Healy. With another almighty booming bellow, the beast backed through the door and disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
En masse, the group scrambled to the relative safety of the landing. Smith reeled against the corridor wall and tugged his green cable-knit jumper to reveal a polar-white stomach with livid burns. “Dracula red fang marks!” Smith hollered. “That big Muppet bit me!”
They trotted, Maasai tribesmen with candles replacing spears, towards the main hall, passing doors and small paintings, abandoned wall lights and endless trails of cobwebs. For a moment, the grand carpeted staircase looked like a bizarre variety performance show as six Fred Astaires deftly danced across its glamorous incline.
“We should leave this place now,” Healy suggested as the six gathered at the fireplace. “Get as far away from here as we can as quickly as we can.”
“We’d freeze to death,” Boycott said. “Still thick fog out there.”
Smith seized a lone wooden stool and placed it directly onto the smoking ashes, upholstered seat included. Nobody raised a complaint at the loss of this antique and its perceived monetary or sentimental value. Concerned faces were illuminated by the flames.
“We should have put that bloody dummy on the fire,” O’Toole suggested.
“I swear to God it was watching our every move,” Healy added.
“Do you want me to get it?” Smith asked.
“Mark E Smith, you never know when a night is done, do you?” Wilson replied.
“I still say none of this is what it seems and we’ve bugger all to worry about,” Clough retorted, accepting another glass of strong alcohol from Smith.
There were serious murmurs of doubt.
“Well,” said Healy, “I’ve seen a ghost who told me to be keep my mouth shut, a creature that was like an atomic-powered guard dog and witnessed words appear on a wall telling us in no uncertain terms to get knotted. So you could say I’m not all that sceptical at the moment!”
“Well, we’re stuck here till daylight,” Clough reasoned. “And if you’re asleep, you can’t see owt.”
“Let’s try and get an hour or two’s kip,” O’Toole added. The last thing we’ll want to do come first light is hike across moors having been awake for two days.”
Bodies became a Tetris jumble of shapes in front of the crackling fire, while ragged curtains and foraged dustsheets were used to cover legs for added warmth.
“I’ll tell you who I wish were here,” Boycott announced as his eyes began to droop.
“Who?” Clough spoke from a tired crumpled face.
“Arnie Sidebottom,” said Boycott. “There’s no flannel with Arnie. Fast bowler, useful batsman, and ’e played soccer an’ all, gettin’ Man United out of Second Division. Never played for England, which were a real shame cos he deserved it. Skinny and tall but tons of guts. He’d ’ave been a real asset to us tonight.”
“But he’s not here,” Clough pointed out. “He’ll be in bed snoring somewhere at home in bloody Barnsley. And I’d give my left arm to be tucked up with him.”