The rain had cleared before sunset, and when I arrived in company with the Misses Bulstrode there was a queue at the door of the Templars Hall, and more people approaching, eager to pay their shilling for enlightenment.
As we waited to get in I examined the countenances of nearby strangers, wondering how many were members of Mr. Ott’s School of British Wisdom, and how many others had been driven by idle curiosity or boredom to one of the few entertainments on offer in this seaside resort out of season.
A poster had been plastered repeatedly on the walls and doors of the hall, showing a lurid illustration of a woman in ragged dress, her hair wild, arms uplifted, and mouth open wide in a scream of anguish. Below this picture, in large letters:
Discover the TRUTH about the “Shrieking Pits”
As revealed through the research of the late Charles Manning (SBW), presented by Jasper Jesperson, Esq. Introduced by Felix Ott, Founder and President, School of BritishWisdom.
TONIGHT ONLY
Applications available on the door to join School of British Wisdom. ½ price entry to registered students.
On the door (I was surprised to discover) was Felix Ott himself, collecting the admission fee and dispensing brochures advertising his School.
“Bella,” he cried, his businesslike demeanor transformed at once into a look I could almost call worshipful. “What a lovely surprise! But I will not take your money. Had I known you might come, I should have sent tickets with my compliments.” He made a gesture, pushing away her attempt to pay. “There is no charge for you.”
“And my sisters?” Without taking her eyes from his face, she indicated the two young women standing behind me.
“Certainly—you must know I hold your entire family in the highest esteem. I am flattered by this attention! Miss Lane, of course, is a friend to Mr. Jesperson—”
Alys spoke up sharply. “Please, may we come in? You are blocking the entrance, sister dear. There are people behind us, you know.”
“Yes, yes, quite so,” murmured Mr. Ott, still in a rapt exchange of looks with Bella, and at the same moment, each reached out to the other; he seized her hand in his, then bent his head over it, brushing her knuckles with his lips.
Once again, I noticed Mr. Ott wore a ring on his little finger, and now, seeing their hands joined, I realized the stone in his ring was, as in hers, a carnelian. Before I could make sense of this connection, their hands had parted, and I was forced ahead, propelled by a determined push from Alys.
“Look at this crowd,” said Alys peevishly. “We shall never find seats together; I wish we had not come.”
“Stay with Ann—you will find two seats easily. Do not worry about us.” Not giving Alys a chance to object, Bella swept me away to the front of the hall, and secured two seats for us in the second row. “Will this be all right for you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I thought you might like to be closer to the speaker—since he is your friend. It does not matter where the girls sit, and certainly there is no necessity for us to sit like a line of ducks.” She gave me an appealing glance, as if she feared she had done wrong, so I hastened to thank her for her thoughtfulness in finding me a seat near the front.
“They are too possessive of me, I fear,” she went on. “Perhaps it is not unusual, having been orphaned so young, that they should cling…but they are grown up now. They must learn. They will soon be embarking on their own adventures.” From her words, it seemed she was still preoccupied by her sisters, but there was a brightness in her eyes and color in her cheeks that had nothing to do with them.
A full-figured, fair-haired young woman had arrived to claim a seat in the front row, and it was clear by the muted flurry of excitement that greeted her that it had been saved for her, as a person of some consequence. It was, evidently, the best seat in the house, and she preened and smiled with satisfaction, nodding regally as she accepted the greetings of her admirers. She was dressed in half mourning, and as she adjusted the fine black woolen shawl, I saw that it was pinned with a carnelian brooch.
It could hardly be coincidence, unless the stone were a particular Norfolk fad.
“Who is she?” I whispered to Bella.
“Miss Goodall.”
I remembered that was the name of the farmer who had been poisoned by his wife—and also a name from Mr. Manning’s address book—just as Bella leaned closer to murmur in my ear, “The daughter of the late farmer, and now owner of the farm. She is a student in Mr. Ott’s School, and one of his chief benefactors. She has given him land on which his School might be built—if he can raise the funds.”
“Did Mr. Ott give her that brooch?”
She nodded, and I saw her give a surreptitious stroke to her own ring. “Carnelian, the stone of the sun and Venus, is his personal talisman. He has the habit of giving some sort of token incorporating the stone to his friends and close associates. Mr. Manning had a small silver box that he always carried about his person, although he could not display it as obviously as I do this.”
Only then did I understand how wrong I had been about her feelings for Charles Manning. If she loved anyone, it was Felix Ott: That was obvious from her heightened color, the look they had exchanged, and the way she treasured his ring. She had refused his offer of marriage, choosing to remain single, dedicated to her profession. And he had not taken that rejection well, judging by the vindictive remarks he had made in his September lecture. Yet he had probably repented of that, and hoped it might be forgotten. I felt certain from his adoring gaze and the kissing of her hand that Mr. Ott was still deeply in love with the woman who sat beside me.
This went some way toward explaining his quarrel with Manning. Would that love have been enough to drive him to murder? When he discovered Manning’s despicable plan—whichever one of the sisters it was aimed at—had a jealous, protective rage made him kill his former friend, either by poison or by mental force, as the only certain way to stop him? Such an emotion was a powerful driver, and Ott had certainly had the opportunity to kill Manning on the night he died.
The buzz of conversation in the hall died down as Felix Ott approached the podium at the front.
“Welcome all,” he said, his voice booming out and silencing the last few chatterers. “What a pleasure it is to see so many of you have decided to venture out on such a cold night—it makes me feel that my message is getting through, and reaching the very people I wish to attract to our School. I hope those of you who have not yet done so will join the School of British Wisdom after tonight’s lecture, whether as a novice scholar or as a supporting member. The information is all in the brochure, so I will not take up any more time on that now.” He cleared his throat.
“Tonight’s lecture is given in memory of my late friend Charles Manning. His death was sudden and unexpected, and has taken away a fine young man who had given evidence of much promise, which he sadly was not able to live long enough to fulfill. Even in his short residence in Aylmerton, he made many friends who mourn him. He was, as well as being a close personal friend of mine, one of the most diligent and devoted of all students in our fledgling School, which is much the poorer for his loss.
“How well I remember our first meeting with this ardent young scholar. Charles had come to Cromer for a short holiday, two or three days to walk along the beach, think about his writing, and let the sea air clear the soot and grime of London from his lungs. On one of his walks he encountered another young man, Albert Cooke, who told him about my School. Charles was immediately intrigued, his own studies having suggested to him that there must be a source of hidden knowledge closer than India or Tibet; ancient wisdom that could be found right here in his native land. Albert brought him along to meet me, and we three talked long into the night. By dawn, his course was set; Charles returned to London just long enough to resign his job and pack his things, then he came back here to begin an exciting new phase of his life, dedicated to the rediscovery and transmission of ancient British wisdom. Alas, that life was cut short.”
With a tragic expression, Ott paused to compose himself. He repeated, “Alas, that life was cut short. However, before he left us, Charles Manning had time to research a subject little known outside these parts, but of potentially great interest: the mystery of the shrieking pits. Who made them, for what purpose, and when? What can folklore and legend tell us about this peculiar feature of the north Norfolk landscape?
“Although he did not live to publish his report, and his final conclusions will never be known, Charles did keep a notebook, and I know he would have wished his work, even unfinished, to reach a wider audience. Therefore, I have invited Mr. Jasper Jesperson, who was one of the last people to see Charles Manning alive, to prepare a paper based upon the notes he left behind.
“Gentleman, ladies, please will you give a warm welcome to tonight’s speaker, all the way from London, Mr. Jasper Jesperson.”
As he spoke his last sentence, the audience broke out in polite applause as a door in the wall behind him opened, and Mr. Jesperson emerged, wearing his black evening clothes, and an unusually solemn expression on his long, pale face. As he stepped up to the podium, the light from the gas jets gave an uncanny glow to his red curls, so that for a brief moment he seemed to wear a nimbus of light, a radiant halo around his head.
Stirred by the rising inflection of Mr. Ott’s voice as much as by the guest speaker’s appearance, the audience clapped more enthusiastically. When the applause eventually died down, Mr. Jesperson began to speak in a relaxed, authoritative way, without notes.
Having often been the recipient of one of Mr. Jesperson’s extempore lectures, I knew what a powerfully retentive memory he possessed, and that his mind was well stocked with facts and figures relating to any number of unlikely subjects.
“Most of you are local residents, and therefore need no lengthy introduction to the feature known collectively as shrieking pits,” he said. “They are found in an area stretching along the coast from Cromer to Cley, with those at Aylmerton, Weybourne, and Beeston being the best known. In the last century there were many more than we see today.
“When were they made? And what for? There are two main theories, the most popular being that they are the remains of ancient dwellings where our prehistoric ancestors made their homes.
“None of the Aylmerton pits now extant had ever been the subject of specific study—prior to the arrival of Mr. Albert Cooke, whose work was then carried on by our Mr. Manning—but some forty years ago the Weybourne pits were extensively excavated by Mr. Harrod, who found no evidence of human habitation in them and concluded that they were Roman in origin and had been used for metalworking. However, some twenty years after that, Mr. Spurrell, the well-known antiquarian, argued that while some were undoubtedly associated with ironworkings, most were far older than the Roman occupation, and they were better described as hut-circles or pit-dwellings.”
He paused and, leaning forward over the podium, smiled a mischievous smile. “So much for the scientific evidence. What else is there? Memory. Of course, there is no one alive today who remembers a time so long ago, but what about folk memory? The memory of the race is reflected in our language; in stories, songs, even place-names. Consider the name: shrieking pits.
“Why are they called that? Well, there is a story that explains…I see many of you smiling and nodding—yes, you all know the story. It is represented on the poster made to advertise my lecture. A woman—some say she is old, with long white hair; others that she is young and dressed in white; some that she is veiled; but all agree that she is the source of the shrieking as she runs about, peering down into the pits and wringing her hands. Why is she distressed?”
Mr. Jesperson paused and looked out at the audience as if expecting an answer, and a young man obliged, shouting out, “She lost her baby!”
“In the pits? That seems a very odd place to leave a baby.” His delivery of this line won him a burst of laughter.
The same young man obliged again: “Somebody else done it. Her man. He threw it down the pit.”
“Is that the story known to you all?” Mr. Jesperson cocked his head and listened to the babble of response from other members of the audience. A few agreed; the greater number did not.
“Tell me what other explanations you have heard for such behavior, please,” he said. “If you would be so kind as to raise your hands…You, sir? Yes?”
A thin, middle-aged man rose to his feet and said, “There is no explanation required. She is a specter, and behaves in standard fashion of her kind, repeating a few simple actions over and over again in the same place, in her case shrieking and wringing her hands. I have never seen her myself, but I have heard the shrieks.”
More hands were up, waving for Mr. Jesperson’s attention. He called upon a man who said he had heard that the woman had been driven mad by an unspecified crime and ever afterward her spirit haunted the pits. Another man said she was looking for something she had lost, and could never rest unless she could recover it, but no one could say what she had lost. The next one said it was certainly a baby, but he had never heard why she should be searching for it in the pits.
“After all, it’s only a ghost story; you can’t expect it to make sense,” declared one gentleman with a long nose and bushy eyebrows.
“Ah, but I do expect them to make sense—their own kind of sense,” replied Mr. Jesperson, leaning forward intently. “Mr. Manning was hardly the first investigator to believe that folklore and local legends, including ghost stories, may contain a core of truth. The difficulty is in sifting out the later accretions, the helpful ‘explanations’ from the original matter. It is like panning for gold.
“There is no evidence that the legend of the shrieking woman reflects an actual, historic crime—infanticide, abduction, or a woman driven to madness—and there is no written reference to this shrieking woman prior to about 1830, but of course that tells us nothing about the antiquity of the oral tradition. Perhaps it reflects a prehistoric crime, the primal horror of which continues to haunt the human mind through the ages? Or perhaps the legend was a deliberate creation—the fear of meeting such a disturbing apparition could serve better than any physical barrier to inhibit exploration of the pits, at least among the credulous.
“Let us return for a moment to that question of what the pits were for. Were they, as the majority opinion has it, truly the homes of our ancestors?
“I find the idea strange. We have heard of the cavemen, but to take up residence in an existing cave is surely different from deliberately excavating a hole in order to live underground when they might have felled trees or piled up stones to create a warm, dry, airier, and altogether more comfortable residence. A perusal of Mr. Manning’s notes shows he thought the same. If these pits were homes, as the antiquarians insist, might they have been inhabited by another race? Not our lineal ancestors, but an earlier form of human being—which may have coexisted with our own earliest forebears. We have evidence of Neanderthal Man. And if there were two distinct forms of human being living at one time—why not more?
“Manning is not the first and will not be the last scholar to suggest that stories about elves, goblins, and fairies are a distant folk memory of a time when early humans shared their world with other intelligent species. There are pygmies still in Africa, and so there may have been long ago in Britain. Whether they were naturally subterranean dwellers, or forced to go underground for some reason, this could explain the shrieking pits.
“Both Cooke and Manning were interested in the possibility that this pygmy race continued to survive into recent centuries, spending their entire lives in hiding, having become ever more fearful of the dominant human race. On the rare occasions when they were seen, they were taken for ghosts or fairies—and as such, in some places, they are even seen today.”
Beside me, Bella sniffed. I did not have to see her expression to sense her scornful disbelief. I wondered where Mr. Jesperson was going with this—and why.
“In Ireland and Scotland and in all the Celtic fringes, mounds, earthworks, chambered tombs, as well as hills and caves are said to be the entrance to the otherworld, where the fairy-folk live. Norfolk is peculiarly bereft of fairy-lore—we might also consider the lack of hills, and the fact that more than tumuli, Norfolk has…pits.”
There was a titter from somewhere in the hall in response to the dramatic pause before he emphasized the final word, and for a moment I was afraid Mr. Jesperson had misjudged his audience. They might begin by laughing, and quickly turn to jeers.
Mr. Jesperson smiled. His shoulders dropped and he tilted his head slightly, looking very much at his ease. “Do you know, before I came to Norfolk I was led to believe it was very flat. And then I came here, and was agreeably surprised by how varied and interesting the landscape is, with so many good viewpoints, and actual hills—not as high as in Scotland, to be sure, but distinctive enough to be given names. And so, having learned that the general knowledge relating to Norfolk’s flatness is not to be swallowed whole, I am cautious also about the supposed dearth of fairy-lore. It may be that the stories are, like the hills, hiding in plain sight. There is evidence, if you know how to look, of their existence in plenty of stories, most of them seeming to have nothing at all to do with this subterranean, pygmy race. For there is another tradition about them, which is well known, and that concerns their secrecy. They do not wish to be spoken of. Even to acknowledge them when they have helped you can have a bad result—as in the stories of the farm wife who knits warm garments and leaves them out for the brownies who had been cleaning her kitchen at night.
“So they are spoken of indirectly, in a roundabout way, under different names. Not fairies or brownies or pixies or elves but—‘them,’ ‘the others,’ and ‘the good neighbors.’ ”
I almost jumped out of my seat at that. In my mind I heard that same phrase repeated, not in Mr. Jesperson’s clear, penetrating tones, but in Maria’s hurried whisper. “The good neighbors.” That was the whole phrase; and now, belatedly, it occurred to me that she did not blame her human neighbors, and had been thinking not of witches and human sacrifices, but of something else entirely.
“There are no stories I can find in Norfolk about babies who are stolen and a stock left in their place, although in Ireland and Cornwall the fertility problems of this other race are well known, providing an explanation for why they should wish to take our children.”
I became convinced that Mr. Jesperson was trying to send me a message. Had he not found a scrap of Maria’s missing shawl in the shrieking pit across the road from the Vicarage? But what he meant me to understand from all this nonsense about fairies, I could not imagine.
“Yet consider the shrieking woman, searching for her child,” he went on. “Perhaps this story, with its mysterious lack of detail, reflects an actual event from a more distant day, something prehistoric and long lost to present knowledge, yet surviving, like a vestigial tailbone, a reminder of a species now extinct.”
He paused. “Or, perhaps, the survival of the story serves a purpose, with the particulars stripped away—its purpose is to frighten; to make people avoid the pits. Many of them are gone now, filled in by farmers. But there is one shrieking pit at least that still survives. It is protected by its location, unmarked on any map, and by surroundings that do not appeal to picnickers. Rumors of adders in the woods, the boggy ground and sinkholes, references to bad air, and those toadstools, spotted red and white, growing in a formation known locally as the Poison Ring—all these things, so insignificant in themselves, work by cumulative effect to provide safety from spying eyes and accidental discovery.”
An arm went up in the audience and was vigorously waved until Mr. Jesperson could no longer pretend not to see. “Yes, sir? You have a question?”
“I certainly do.” A wiry, white-haired man of pugnacious aspect sprang to his feet. “You imply one moment that this pygmy race is extinct; the next that it continues to coexist with us, and relies on superstitious fears to keep from being discovered.”
Mr. Jesperson inclined his head and with a slight smile asked, “And your question?”
“Well, which is it?”
“Which…?”
“Are these creatures still living or not?”
Mr. Jesperson raised his eyebrows. “I really could not say. However, I think it is fair to assume that Albert Cooke met his death trying to answer that very question.”
There were some gasps in the hall, and an undercurrent of muttering that grew louder, until a young man called out, “You say the fairies killed him?” And there was a general outbreak of laughter.
Mr. Jesperson waited for it to die down before he went on. “No, I do not say that. I tend to agree with the police, that Cooke met his death by accident, striking his head. If he slipped on the grass, perhaps as the result of a sudden fright…The only problem with that theory is that the nearest and most likely place where he could have acquired a fatal injury is at the bottom of the pit. And if he met his death at the bottom of the pit, why was his body not found there, instead of lying in the middle of the Poison Ring?”
His first questioner, the white-haired gentleman, was still on his feet, and now spoke up again: “But what do you think?”
“I am not here to give my opinion,” he replied gently. “My opinion does not matter. Before this week I had never heard of the shrieking pits, nor given any thought to the idea of an aboriginal race of British pygmies. All of this was new territory when I first encountered Charles Manning’s notes. My intention this evening is not to pass judgment on his ideas and discoveries, but only to give them a public airing, so that his work may outlive him, if it is found worthy.”
The old gentleman would not give up. “Well, then, what did Manning think? Did he think there was something still living in the pits?”
“That was a question still under investigation when he died.”
“So there’s no answer?”
“This may be something for future investigation by Mr. Ott’s School,” said Mr. Jesperson. “Thank you for your kind attention.” He bowed.
Recognizing that Mr. Jesperson had concluded his presentation, Felix Ott came forward to invite questions from the floor. A sea of hands appeared, but as he called upon various individuals, it was soon apparent that although many people wished to be heard, very few had anything that could be described as a question. Some wished to express agreement, disagreement, or disapproval, but most had a story to tell: inexplicable experiences, strange encounters, disappearances, noises in the night—I found it all quite interesting and should have been glad to hear more, but Bella claimed my attention.
“I cannot believe it,” she murmured, frowning. “Charles never said anything of this to us.”
“You mean about the…” I hesitated over what word to use. “About the pygmy race?”
“Not anything. He never even expressed any particular interest in the shrieking pits.”
“I thought it was for the shrieking pits that he came to Aylmerton?”
“He never said so. I understood that the shrieking pits were an interest of his friend, Mr. Cooke.
“Perhaps Charles took it up as a subject to investigate, to honor his friend,” she mused. “But it never struck me that the question of the shrieking pits—how they came to be—was the sort of mystery that Felix’s followers go in for. I cannot pronounce on Mr. Cooke’s interest, for he never shared any particulars of his researches with me; I only know that when he used my library, the books he consulted were on the subject of mushrooms.”