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Ghosts in the Clock

The Ghosts Walk Again

Past Imperfect

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THE GASTLEIGH TOWERS LIGHT RAILWAY
When Peter Edwards got a job driving a train he thought it was the best job he had ever had or was ever likely to have. It was no ordinary train either, but a miniature one in the grounds of a big house which was opening up to visitors. The railway had been built by one of the family who had owned the house many years before because he fancied driving a train. Mr. Clench, the present head of the family, had seen that railways in other stately homes were very popular and decided to do up the track a bit and bring out the old engine from the shed in which it had been kept for at least fifty years.
Miniature is probably not the right description for the railway, because the engine, which was painted a bright red, had a cab large enough for Peter to stand in and keep him dry if it rained, and the three carriages were big enough to take ten people in each, seated in comfort, but the engine itself was quite small, with a boiler only about four feet long. It had a tall funnel and lots of brass work all over it and looked very smart after Peter had repainted the engine and polished it well. He painted G. T. L. R. on the sides of the cab in gold letters (it stood for "Ghastleigh Towers Light Railway"). The engine pulled the carriages at a moderate speed around part of the enormous park that surrounded the house. It could go much faster but Mr. Clench suggested that Peter take it slowly so that people thought they were getting their moneys worth. The carriages had a roof but the sides were open so people could see out and take photographs.
Mind you, just what they were supposed to take photographs of was the question. The railway was very fine and very popular and Peter did a good job, smiling at the people who took the train, chatting to the children and all in all enjoying himself immensely, but as for the house and garden....... To be honest, it wasn't quite what people expected when they visited a stately home. The park was overgrown and gloomy, full of dark groves of huge trees and lots of bushes that hung over the pathways and brushed against you, all damp and clammy.

There were statues in the park that were ...well....different. Great grotesque faces, monsters that frightened little children when they came across them in the trees until they realised they were made of stone, fountains whose pipes had long since rusted away and whose tritons and sea monsters were frozen in a peculiar dance, waiting for water to gush from their mouths.
Then there was the garden. This was not overgrown and indeed was well looked after by old Gasblast the gardener, but it was full of plants whose main attraction to Gasblast seemed to be that they were as dark in colour as possible - black, brown and dark green, hardly a speck of bright colour anywhere, all arranged in neat rows, the bushes or shrubs clipped into angular shapes, and surrounded by beds of gloomy flowers - Gasblast's speciality was growing lilies of a shocking deep purple shade.
Gasblast was often about the garden doing this or that and he frightened the children by his constant mumbling and occasional guttural shouts at birds who dared to sing in the trees. He looked as if he was about two hundred years old and dressed all in black, his eyes bloodshot and rolling as he cackled his way around the lawns.
Black seemed to the uniform for all the employees of the place. Peter had been given a smart black jacket and trousers with gold buttons as his engine driver's dress but he had suggested that with all the oil and smoke a pair of overalls would be better so he wore a smart blue pair of his own and washed them regularly.
Then there were the teas, prepared and served by the long, drooping figure of Miss Chasm, whose face was enough to turn the cream in the cream teas sour. Her sandwiches were full of limp cress, rubberised ham, or cheese that looked and tasted like plastic. Her cakes were so solid that even the birds wouldn't touch them. Her tea was so weak that you could see the bottom of the cup through it even with the milk in. One man complained that she must be hanging the tea bags up to dry out the back so she could use them again. Not many people complained though, because Miss Chasm looked so forbidding, but word got round and they didn't sell a lot of lunches and teas in Gastleigh Towers.
Staggers, the butler now turned guide, took people around the house and told them the history of the Clench family. The house was a big, grey granite pile, all spires, towers and turrets, the pointed windows grimy and rooms dusty and smelling of mothballs. The portraits of the family would put anyone off their dinner. The Clench family had one thing in common - ugliness. They were more grotesque than a set of gargoyles in a church and they glared out at the world from their pictures. The stories Staggers told the visitors about them matched the faces perfectly. Some of the family were famous for murdering each other or someone else and all the people in the portraits seemed to have been either mad or very strange.
There was the Fifth Earl of Clench, who collected rocks - not different kinds of rock, just lumps of granite, all the same size. He stored them in his room above the Library until the weight bought the ceiling down and the whole lot fell on him as he was passing underneath.
Then there was the Marchioness of Stoop whose hobby was sewing. All her life she sewed, making the most beautiful and intricate patterns with her needle, but as she used black thread on black velvet cloth, no one could ever see the patterns.
Sir Jedediah Clench kept anteaters, dozens of them. Terrified of insects, he slept on a bed perched on top of a tall pole in the Great Hall.
He was killed when woodworm ate through the pole one night.
The Duke of Howling Moor stared out at the world from his portrait with a hideous expression, and only one eye. He was fond of archery and wanted to know how it was that Harold had lost his eye at the Battle of Hastings and was always trying to see if he could duplicate the shot. He tied people up in the park and shot at them with his bow, trying to "do a Harold" as he said; luckily for his targets he always missed. However one of his arrows got caught in a tree and when he came up to his intended victim and picked up all his arrows, he found there was one missing. As he looked up to find out where it had gone, the arrow came down and he did a Harold on himself.
Peter Edwards had been given a tour of the house before it opened, when Staggers was rehearsing and he wondered just what kind of an effect it was going to have on people. Of course, it frightened a lot of them! So did Staggers as he materialised out of the gloom in the Great Hall to greet yet another group of intrepid visitors, his dead white face and staring eyes, hollow cheeks and hairless head made even more unnerving by the fact that he was seven feet tall.
He would introduce the owner sometimes when the visitors reached the library - not that all of them lasted that long, because there was quite a drop-out rate along the way. "Here is the honourable Mr. Clench, our distinguished employer," he would say and indicate a huge empty leather armchair. Then Mr. Clench would leap up from where he was hiding on the other side of it, and smile at the visitors. It was his idea of a joke but it terrified people. Mr. Clench had hair that stuck out in all directions, goggle eyes and more teeth than a shark. He had dead white skin, like Staggers, for he never went outside in the sun, but he had a bright red patch on each cheek. He looked like some demented doll, being only four feet high.
All in all, Peter did not think that the first season of the opening of Gastleigh Towers was going to be a success and was rather worried that when it closed, he was going to be out of a job. However, his railway was very popular indeed. Children loved it and so did the grown ups, but they didn't like to admit it (you are supposed to grow out of liking rides on steam engines but a lot of people never do). The track curved all around the park, in and out of groves of trees, all round the big dank black lake, in tunnels and over bridges. It was easily the most popular thing about Gastleigh Towers and Peter was a great success as driver and ticket collector, calling out the names of places as they passed, "Dead man's dike", "hangman's spinney", "Gibbet bridge". He enjoyed the job and people liked him, but no-one ever came back for a return visit to the park and many complained. After all the house was advertised as being a beautiful stately home, full of magnificent works of art, a residence of a noble family who were of great historic interest, with refreshments of the highest standard, a garden of great beauty and a magnificent park, including exotic wildlife. The "exotic wildlife" was the idea of Mr. Clench who had seen safari parks advertised and thought he would like the same attraction at Ghastly Towers. Not having any money to buy some real wild animals he took the animals that lived in the park and dressed them up, hoping no would notice. However, painting a pig yellow with black stripes did not make it look like a tiger, not even with a set of cardboard teeth. Tying a length of hosepipe and a pair of cardboard ears on the donkey didn't make it look much like an elephant either, not even a baby elephant. Mr. Clench ordered that the three sheep be died yellow and given bushy wigs around their necks but they still didn't look like lions, any more than the goat looked like a giraffe with a long length of drain pipe tied on top of it's head. People noticed these things and while the children laughed, the parents were very annoyed.
Many said the whole thing was a swindle and demanded their money back - or thought of doing so until they saw Spigot, the ticket salesman's dog, a cross between an Irish wolfhound and a grizzly bear.
Even so, the number of visitors began to fall as the reputation of the place spread. Peter had plenty of time to polish the engine, repaint the carriages and see to any repairs in the track. One day he was walking along the track on the far side of the park from the house when he noticed that there was a set of points he hadn't seen before and a branch line curving away through a dense wood towards a bit of the enormous park that wasn't open. It had all been covered up with brush wood and pine needles but recent rains and strong winds had cleared a bit of it. Peter tried to make out where it went but the trees were too thick; all he could see vaguely visible in the distance over the tops of the trees were crags and cliffs of rock; there was a permanent mist over the trees too and it was hard to make anything out. He mentioned his discovery to Mr. Clench when he saw him that evening before he went home. Mr. Clench became very agitated.
"You must never go down that track," he hissed, "It's very dangerous. The track goes through a marsh and one of my cousins once tried to go through the wood along that track. He never came back. It's far too dangerous. Please don't mention it again. It's very painful for me to think about it. My poor cousin." and he wiped his eyes although he still had a smile on his face. But then he always did - a fixed grin almost from ear to ear.
Peter carried on with his work but there came a day when no-one visited the park at all. He was bored and fed up and getting to be rather suspicious of the strange people of the house who wouldn't talk to him but glowered at him whenever he went past. They didn't like him because his railway was the only popular attraction in the whole place and Gasblast kept complaining that the railway frightened the colony of giant black beetles he kept in the garden. He decided he would do some exploring and that afternoon he set off in the train to see where the branch line went. He took his sandwiches with him - he never bought any from Miss Chasm but always made his own which made her complain. He chugged gently around the park until he came to the place where the branch line began. The sky had clouded over and it was getting dark and threatening rain. No-one could see him from the house, so he got out the cab, brushed the line clear for a fair distance until he found that the rails were no longer hidden, went back and oiled the points and after a bit of effort was able to change them so the train could enter the branch line. He lit the lanterns that hung on the front of the engine and opened the throttle gently.
The train chugged into the great gloomy wood, and it began to get darker and darker as the trees crowded in, spreading their branches overhead so that they almost shut out the light. All around him were dense bushes and huge tree trunks, very old and very thick. He heard odd noises in the distance, like faint howls and grunts, and decided he would keep going and wouldn't get out to find out what they were! The train chugged on for a long way through the wood until he began to find it getting very misty and murky. He was able to make out that he was now travelling through a marsh; dead trees and moss-covered rocks poked out of stagnant pools of green water or mud and the noises became louder too. He heard the screeching of owls and cacklings and gruntings all around and he saw odd lights here and there, little flickering blue flames in the distance in the trees. Still he went on - the track as on firm foundations and there was no problem for the train, no danger of it sinking. Then he had a shock, because all of a sudden a huge wall of rock reared up out the mist in front of him and he thought the train was going to smash right into it! But it didn't - instead, the train entered a tunnel, cut right through the rock, and continued on its way.
The rails just kept going on and the tunnel seemed quite clear of any obstruction so Peter kept the engine going nice and slowly and had his sandwiches and made himself a cup of tea from hot water out of the boiler of the engine - there was a little tap especially for this purpose. It would have been cold in the tunnel if he had been walking but in the cab of the engine, with the fire going and the firebox door open it was quite warm. He kept a good look out to see if there was anything on the track but all he could see was the tunnel going on and on and at times there were other tunnels branching off from the main one. There was still plenty of coal left for the return journey.
Then, just as he was finishing his sandwiches the train came out of the tunnel into what seemed to be a little valley, with sheer rock walls on every side, all covered with trees and bushes. The sun was out now and it looked quite pretty. The trees and undergrowth here were lighter and not nearly so gloomy as in the park. Peter looked ahead and saw that there was a little platform coming up and a set of buffers. This was the end of the line. He stopped the train and looked about him; in the trees a little way off, nestling against the rocky wall of the valley, was a house.
It was a small house, a bit like a smaller version of the hall, but not so grim looking. The windows weren't cracked and broken and they had been cleaned recently, the door was open - and there was a figure just inside! The figure came out and waved to Peter. It was the figure of a large lady, dressed in bright red.
"Come in," she called, "Come in! You're the first visitor I've had for ages! What's your name?"
Peter made his way over to the house, but he was a bit wary; perhaps this was where the family put it's more batty members, out of the way - and as the rest of them were so odd, what would this one be like? However, the lady was perfectly friendly, if a touch formidable. She wore red batwing glasses, had a sharp nose and a lot of chins. Her hair was a delicate shade of light blue. She ushered Peter inside.
The inside of the house was spotless, neat and tidy. The furniture was old and solid, very like that in the Hall although it was looked after much better, but everywhere there were candles, all over the place, in candlesticks, bottles and on saucers. It seemed a nasty fire risk.
"I can't stand the dark," said the lady, who introduced herself as Hortense Clench, aunt of Mr. Clench, "I must have light and there's no electricity here. The tunnels are part of an old coal mine and there's heaps of coal for a fire and my stove but no gas or electric. I've been imprisoned here, you know, by my nephew Clarence."
"You mean that there is no other way out?" asked Peter.
"None. The rock walls of this valley are far too steep for me to climb and I wouldn't dream of trying to find my way through the tunnels in the dark - as my nasty little nephew knows. I hate to think what he is doing to the hall in my absence. How did you find your way here?"
Peter told her - and he told her what was happening at the Hall, She was horrified.
"I had no objection to him opening the Hall but I knew it would be a disaster if that lot had anything to do with it. I wanted to open it myself and get people in to help me, people who knew what they were doing. They all thought they would get the sack and so they imprisoned me here and decided to open it for themselves by the sound of it - and a right mess they are making of it too. The hall is mine until I die and I'll have Clarence's guts for garters for this!"
She was very angry and insisted Peter take her back as soon as possible. He had no objections. As she packed a few things - mostly a couple of bags full of candles - Peter asked her what she had lived on.
"Tinned salmon and tuna, tinned potatoes, tinned carrots and peas - I never want to see another tin as long as I live," she replied, and showed Peter a cupboard piled high with tinned food. Apparently Clarence had persuaded her to go to the house in the valley by suggesting that it could be part of a tour of the park. He had already stocked up the house with candles and tins and had then taken her in the train and once she was inside the house he had run off and left her.
"He would probably have released me at the end of the season - but then he might well have forgotten all about me and I hate to think what might have happened then," said Aunt Hortense with a shudder.
Peter made her comfortable in the carriage nearest the engine, then he made sure there was enough water in the boiler and made up the fire. The engine soon had a head of steam up and began to chuff its way back along the track and through the tunnel. Aunt Hortense lit a few candles and arranged them around the carriage. They travelled back along the tunnel and through the swamp and the woods. Once back in the park, Peter increased the speed and as the train drew nearer to the house he noticed that there was a welcoming committee - Staggers, Miss Chasm and Gasblast were waiting for him, probably to complain that he had gone off and been too long away. However, when they saw Aunt Hortense their faces fell and they began to try and shuffle away.
"Come back, all of you!" roared Aunt Hortense, "Where is that no good, snivelling little brat of a nephew of mine!"
There was a wail from the house where Mr. Clench had just looked through the window and had seen his aunt in the train. He came out, shame faced and looking very nervous. Aunt Hortense descended from the train and gripped her nephew's ear hard. He whined and wailed as she told him exactly what she thought of him and the other members of the household. Then she dragged him into the house and called the rest of them to follow her. Peter tagged on behind.
She sat herself down in the Great Hall and demanded to know what had been going on. They told her - and they said that things were not going very well and fewer and fewer visitors were coming.
"If it goes on like this, we shall have to close and then it will be all up with us," said Staggers, gloomily.
"I don't understand it," whined Mr. Clench, now released by his aunt. "What are we doing wrong?"
"That's easy. Everyone thinks that this place is a chamber of horrors," said Peter.
"Then that is what we shall advertise it as!" shouted Aunt Hortense. "People will then expect it to be horrible! And they will be quite pleased when it turns out to every bit as awful as they expected!"
"Will we all be sacked?" asked Miss Chasm in her toneless, reedy voice.
"Certainly not. We will need a staff who look as horrible as the hall and you lot fit the bill perfectly," said Aunt Hortense. The others didn't know whether to look pleased or upset. "But I'm putting myself in charge of the catering - you can help Staggers in the house," she continued, eyeing Miss Chasm.
From that moment Gastleigh Towers was a great success. Billed as a House of Horror with a Grim Garden and a Perilous Park, people flocked to see it and loved every minute. Staggers was a great success with his tours, assisted by Miss Chasm, and both of them began to enjoy trying to frighten people with tales of the family. Gasblast's garden was so popular that he set up a stall selling horrible plants for people to give to relatives they didn't like and he did very well. The animals had all their cardboard bits removed and were much happier. They were kept in comfortable pens for children to see them close to. They enjoyed being patted and fussed. The park became a real attraction, especially when the woods and the tunnels were opened up for the train rides, little maps being provided for visitors with places marked on it like "the Mithering Mines" and "the Slithering Swamp." A souvenir shop was opened up in the little house in the rocky valley manned by Clarence Clench who was left there for the season, along with all the tinned stuff. His begging to be taken back in the train away from the valley was always regarded as very funny by the visitors and all part of the act. Aunt Hortense's teas were excellent - everything fresh, no tinned stuff, and of course the railway was always the most popular attraction of all. They made enough money to repair the house - but they were very careful not to repair it too well; after all, it was supposed to look gloomy and decrepit. Peter kept his job of course and was as happy as could be, driving his train all day long.