THE HOUSE OF WONDERS

C.E. WARD

An acrid waft of blue tobacco smoke woke me from an early evening doze in my comfortable chair in the garden. I started suddenly and sat up rather disorientated, glancing across at Stevenson who reclined in the wicker chair on the porch of the summerhouse, the local newspaper open untidily on his knees, having paused in his perusal to light his gnarled old briar. He returned my look with a smile, and puffed his pipe as though his life depended on it, overpowering the pleasant scents of the flowers with the pervasive fumes of his Navy flake.

“Did I wake you?” he asked facetiously. “I’ve just been looking through the obituaries, and I see that Jack Froston has died. Aged 67—no great age.”

“Wasn’t he a friend of yours? I had no idea that he’d been ill. It must have been quite sudden.”

Stevenson tamped the glowing ashes in his briar with a forefinger so apparently unfeeling I’d often suspected the stained brown digit was made of the same material as his pipe. “Well, the last time I saw him he wasn’t wonderful—which could hardly be expected after that odd business with his last book. He was a changed man after that. Lost a lot of weight and got quite apathetic and short tempered. None of the boundless enthusiasm he’d once had, and his writing suffered; no more books but just the odd piece for a magazine or journal. Obviously Janice’s death was a blow to him too, and it was after her funeral that Jack and I got talking over a few drinks at her wake. That was when he told me a few strange things about the last book he’d researched and written, and that he believed his problems had originated from there. Showmen of England, do you recall it?”

I sat up in my chair intrigued. “Yes, I have a copy of it on my shelves somewhere. Quite interesting and quirky if I recall correctly and full of obscure photographs as all his books were. It wasn’t quite his usual territory was it? Country houses, old customs and folklore were more in his line. His research was as thorough as always of course—I knew nothing about the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show appearing locally in the early 1900s until I read about it there. Every interesting travelling show, fair, place of amusement and exhibition from the 1830s to the early 1970s must have been included.”

“Not quite everything,” Stevenson replied in that low and mysterious tone I was used to between draws on his briar. “He told me that he’d omitted a full chapter of the manuscript which he’d intended his publisher to have. The odd thing I remember him saying about that was that he’d researched it too well. He was very drunk at the time and I didn’t take that much notice, and it’s sad to say he was very much on a downward slide with all his very heavy drinking and smoking. I only saw Jack a couple of times after that, and he was becoming very reclusive and cutting himself off from the few friends who’d still put up with his moods and manner. It was after his friend Wildman died that he really put up the shutters. But not before he’d told me some very strange things at our last meeting.”

“You mentioned a missing chapter? Did he tell you much about its content?”

Stevenson refilled his pipe and lit it, thick, choking swirls of smoke drifting off above his head into the clear June sky.

I was coming to that. Tell me, have you ever heard of Spangler’s House of Wonders? I thought not. It was a place of amusement, if that’s the right description, back in the late nineteenth century up until 1969. It lasted around a hundred years I believe, and was originally a cheap and lurid place of amusement in the East End of London, nestled among the poorer music halls and gin palaces. Eventually it moved to be housed in a Georgian property just off the front of a seaside town on the East Coast—the place isn’t important so I won’t mention it. You must recall the sort of establishment I’m talking about; crudely garish, slightly tawdry and certainly down at heel in the last few decades of its existence. A place where Victorian and Edwardian holiday makers, tourists and bored thrill seekers would flock, tired of ice-cream, sandy beaches, bathing huts and the vagaries of our uncertain English summer weather. A place to idle away an hour or so, was Spangler’s, and it was really no different to similar establishments at other resorts dotted around our coastline. A man by the name of Hawkins was its proprietor, and after him, his son. Mr. Spangler, whoever he was, appeared to have relinquished any original rights to the business late in the 1880s—and only his name remained on the brightly illuminated sign above the doors and ticket booth, which promised “Thrills, Curiosities, Magic, History, Antiquities and Relics of the Ages for the price of a Shilling!” Beneath this extravagant promise were lurid paintings on boards—Pharoah’s army and chariots being engulfed by the Red Sea, its huge and sweeping waves more reminiscent of Noah’s flood than the hand of God of Moses’s time, as the turbulent waters covered both a background of pyramids and the sphinx; a storm-wracked whaling schooner hunting a huge green serpent of unknown but grotesquely monstrous species in the turmoil of crashing waves in a boiling expanse of sea, and a curious and statuesquely feminine Pandora opening her richly decorated box, which emitted a bright glow illuminating the crude beauty of her startled face. These, and more, to tempt and draw the curious clientele. Inside, beyond a heavy green fringed velvet curtain and a dimly lit corridor, one entered various apartments. One, full of glass display cases containing natural and decidedly unnatural phenomena; a “dead and preserved mermaid,” the only existing unicorn horn and skull, skeletal remains of “the Little People” who apparently once roamed these isles so freely, that sort of thing. Another held historical memorabilia—locks of dead monarchs’ hair, the campaign desk and snuff box of Napoleon as well as his famous cocked hat and death mask, the “missing” colour of the 44th Regiment taken from the slain at Gandamack following the infamous Retreat from Kabul, nestling among other “lost” Roman Eagles from the massacre of the Teutoberg Forest—all of highly suspect and dubious provenance of course. Religious relics featured as well; a nail and splinter of wood from the Cross of Calvary, a shard of timber from the Ark—even a Roman denaria from the reign of Tiberius alleged to have been one of the thirty paid to Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Christ. All viewed in rooms and grimy glass cases where the light was dim to add to the reverent atmosphere, not of course to impede a too searching examination and scrutiny! A gallery of waxworks followed, mostly in a Penny Dreadful Chamber of Horrors fashion, depicting crime and punishment with scenes of quite horrific and barbaric torture. And at the end, in more prosaic manner, some rows of mechanical amusement machines, where by dropping pennies in slots, one could see what the butler had, or watch executions by axe and rope outside castle walls and prison gates; or ghostly goings on in haunted bedrooms and cellars performed by tiny clockwork figures in miniature rooms and diorama type vignettes in glass fronted boxes—“Working Models,” as they were called.

I myself saw the place twice, though in very different ways and circumstances. The first time was when I was very young, on holiday with my parents. What I’ve just described springs from my memory of that visit. This was just before the War, in 1939, and I think we went in more to get some relief from what was a very hot and sunny day as much as anything—of course I was keen and initially entranced by the air of circus and brash theatricality of the place. As I said, once inside you were struck by the gloom, the only light coming from a few multi-coloured electric bulbs—I suppose it had originally been gaslight in its earlier years—but what really arrested you was the cold. Of course we were all wearing light summer clothes, but there was a chill about that place I’ve never experienced elsewhere in my life on such a hot day outside; and you know just how many churches, cathedrals and abbeys I’ve visited over the course of long years. There were very few other people in there, and most of them didn’t seem to want to linger for very long. There was an air of long neglect, dust, disrepair and a certain tarnished and faded grandeur overshadowing the whole exhibition—not uncommon in such places of course—but even the old man who sat perched in the ticket booth outside had been aloof and unfriendly. We wandered from one dimly lit room to the next, gazing at indistinct objects and dust enshrouded relics in their dirty glass cabinets, not so much with an air of wonder but rather an uncomfortable and uneasy scrutiny; and I think we were all quite glad, after I’d been allowed to drop a penny or two into the amusement machines and working models in the final gallery, to take our leave and get out into the sunlight and fresh air once more.

I still have unpleasant memories of the waxwork figures. Most, as I’ve said, were of the most awful executions and tortures. The rack and the headsman’s block were accompanied by such horrible foreign refinements of man’s cruelty as the Chinese Water Torture, which showed a poor wretch with horribly distended stomach being forced to drink from a tube by two inscrutable looking Boxer soldiers, while the Algerian Hooks portrayed a writhing and slowly dying sufferer impaled upon the same. One would have sought consolation by the knowledge that the torn flesh was but wax, and the freely flowing blood and entrails just red paint and packing straw; and yet there was something in the attitude and expressions of the frozen in time mannequins that suggested a most disturbing realism and a firsthand eyewitness knowledge. The working models were equally unsettling—one, “The Haunted Bedroom,” gave me nightmares for weeks. It was just as well that one intriguing machine, entitled “Our Secret Past” and also stating “The Fright of your Life! View at your Peril!” was roped off under a low archway, with an “Out of Order” sign propped up against its booth.

I need to fast forward nearly twenty years now. I’d been back to that same seaside town around 1958 while on a short holiday in the area, and remembering my childhood visit to the House of Wonders, was curious to see if it was still there. Of course, a lot had changed since the war and my distant memories of the place, and I was disappointed but not surprised to find that the establishment had gone, and not just boarded up and derelict but the whole edifice a vacant lot strewn with bricks and rubble. I made a few enquiries, and learnt that a bomb from Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe had put paid to it—as well as the pier pavilion and a couple of other municipal buildings—in 1941, a group of Dorniers having mistaken the place for Lowestoft. What I hadn’t expected to be told was that Spangler’s House of Wonders had shut up shop and vacated the area just a week before the bomb from the air raid had destroyed the entire building.

“You might call that fortuitous,” Mr. Donovan, the gentleman in the local museum where I made my enquiries informed me. “But the truth is that the building was required for the war effort, being used as an air-raid warden’s post rather ironically as things turned out. The fact is that Spangler’s had outworn its welcome here. There’d been some complaints about the nature of the business and some of the people it seemed to attract. There was talk of black market trading, war profiteering, Nazi spies and fifth columnists, even German paratroops and storm-troopers; you name it, sir, but these were anxious and suspicious times. Well, there had been reports that there were some strange comings and goings there—always late at night and under cover of darkness. A couple of ‘spivs’ as they were called, had already been arrested selling black market tobacco and petrol coupons in the place during its opening hours—so the police began keeping quite a close surveillance on Spangler’s day and night. It wasn’t long before one of the duty constables, from his concealed position in a shop doorway across the street, noticed a small, hunched figure, very muffled up, make its way into the old exhibition hall by way of a door next to the main entrance. The constable was under strict orders to observe and just make notes in his pocket book, and this is what he, and his relief and other officers did for the better part of a month. During that time the same strange person was seen on various other occasions, always in the small hours between midnight and before dawn, sometimes alone but at other times accompanied by either a man or woman. The odd thing was that none of these people appeared to leave. Of course, the building was both old and large and rambling; and the police train of thought was that these late night visitors, whoever they were, were leaving by some concealed exit through the cellars, roof, or an adjoining party wall into one of the next door premises. Naturally, by now they were very suspicious; not least by the constant short person who appeared to lead the others to Spangler’s, gain admittance, and answered no description to either old Hawkins the proprietor, or his son, who were the only people known to live in an upstairs apartment on the premises.

“The Chief Constable was both concerned and curious as more and more of his officers’ reports landed on his desk every morning. He’d been naturally cautious, not wanting his men to accost anyone before he had a clearer picture and something more substantial to go on—but four weeks on he was no further forward. None of his men could provide anything more than the scantiest descriptions of any of the persons they’d observed, due to the distance of their concealed position and the darkness; but one detail was recurrent—the ones who accompanied the short figure were invariably unsteady on their feet and appeared either enfeebled or inebriated. It was time for a more daring strategy, and as undercover officers posing as tourists had already been successful in the two former arrests, this plan was repeated, with certain subtle refinements. Four plain clothes men were to visit Spangler’s shortly before closing time, and by causing a diversion two of them were to remain inside the premises while the other pair left to return and keep watch on the outside later that evening.

“The way things turned out, it wasn’t anything like as difficult as they’d imagined. Old Mr. Hawkins took their admission fee from his ticket booth and, as his son wasn’t around at the time and he employed no other staff, all the officers had to do was find somewhere quiet to hide in the dark nooks and corners of the waxworks exhibition. As most of the attractions in the town bore “Closed for the Duration” signs and the beach was entangled with barbed wire and off limits, this exercise went unnoticed by the few other visitors around. A Sergeant Fargill and DC Newcombe were left inside, good, steady and experienced officers who’d been in the force for years, and when the last few visitors filtered out and Mr. Hawkins sauntered feebly through the exhibition, turning off the dim lights and making a very cursory shortsighted inspection, they obviously went unnoticed as the doors were locked and the proprietor ambled off to his living quarters upstairs. All that Fargill and Newcomb had to do now was lie in wait, observe whatever might occur, and take any necessary appropriate action.

“PC’s Hicks and Stanley returned from their mugs of tea and sandwiches at the station just after dusk, and took up their positions some sixty or so yards away from the House of Wonders. As it was September with double daylight hours in force, they sympathised with the plight of their two colleagues inside, who were no doubt craving some tea and a smoke. Sometime after midnight, Hicks grabbed Stanley’s arm—he’d seen the approach of the familiar short figure, swathed in its usual dark coloured long coat—but this time apparently alone. There was something horrible in the way the figure kept ducking its head at what in the darkness looked like a small pile of white table linen clutched close to its chest; and the hungry, sucking noises which it made as it did so made both men feel distinctly nauseous, uneasy and apprehensive. Within moments the almost dwarf-like man—for all observers had agreed its gait and appearance to be male—had opened and swept through the side door; not on this occasion as smoothly as others for the bundle it was carrying in its stunted arms, which looked in the uncertain light to be a large child’s rag-doll with limp white arms dangling loosely, hampered its movements. It wasn’t the time or place for discussion of course, and within the next two minutes something else alerted them to a new course of action and thinking.

“It was the shrill blast of a police whistle, quickly followed by another. One stopped after a long continuous burst—the other blew harder and at short intervals—until it became as silent as the first. By this time both Hicks and Stanley were at the doors by the ticket booth, hammering at the wood and glass with their truncheons, and demanding entrance at the tops of their voices. Wood splinters flew from the bruised timber and chunks of broken glass fell from the panes above—and then most horribly a pair of flexing, veined hands shot through the shattered windows—clutching with white knuckles at the mullions and pulling at them desperately, impervious it seemed of the cuts and tears the jagged, broken shards were inflicting on the scrabbling white flesh. Lights came on within, and as the door was unlocked a wild figure burst out between the two horrified policemen, its hair flying and outstretched hands dripping copious black, wet runnels in the moonlight. Mr. Hawkins stood in the open doorway, frail, bewildered and incongruous in his dressing gown, and in a very short time he’d been arrested and other policemen, the Chief Constable among them, was at the scene.

“The proprietor, and his son when found, were of course taken in for questioning, and Spangler’s House of Wonders was most thoroughly searched. It was all to no avail as despite the rumours, no German spies, paratroops or fifth columnists were found, or anything else remotely suspicious. Mr. Hawkins and his son maintained an aloof and difficult silence, though their reclusivity and eccentricity hardly marked them as either Nazi sympathisers or black marketeers; and their utter denial of any knowledge of nocturnal visitors to their establishment could not be shaken, even against the officers’ oral and written statements. A window at the rear of the premises, in the amusement arcade, was found to be open; this looked onto a small yard which could only be accessed by a gate in a high brick wall which led into an alley back out onto the main thoroughfare. The Chief Constable and his detectives were both embarrassed and mystified by a mass of loose ends— which included a missing police officer, for DC Newcomb had vanished without trace. Sergeant Fargill, for it was he who had fled from the House of Wonders with bubbling moans of terror and severely lacerated hands, was of no help either. After having been found struggling frantically in a coil of barbed wire on the seafront, he’d been rushed to hospital with his injuries, later discharging himself, returning home and shooting himself through the mouth and brains with a Webley .38 service revolver he kept in a bureau.

“It doesn’t need me to explain how Spangler’s House of Wonders was forced to close down and move out shortly after this. What the police hadn’t achieved the council soon did, and Hawkins and Son and all their impedimenta were evicted and taken away, destination unknown, in a small fleet of Pickford lorries. I don’t think Hawkins made any real fuss about it. His takings and custom evaporated after the business with Fargill and Newcomb, and the place had attracted a more unpleasant reputation and darker stories and suspicions than the ones which had preceded them. You must remember that this was wartime and people could disappear without anyone taking too much notice, what with call ups and war work, to say nothing of those with less honourable motives. Well, DC Newcomb was obviously immediately missed—and before morning a frantic and distressed woman was in the police station reporting that her two-year-old daughter had similarly vanished from their Anderson shelter in the back garden. And that was when a few other reports started to filter in, of three different people who were strangers to the locality and had only been missed by their relatives at home after a protracted silence, and four more local women of, shall we say, dubious morals?

“To cut a long story short, these people simply weren’t found. Not one of them, ever again. You can imagine of course the problems the poor, harassed Chief Constable found himself dealing with. One of his own men ending his life so unexpectedly and horribly and another one vanishing without trace was bad enough, but when the rest of his officers’ statements and reports of their surveillances had been examined and analysed, the count of people seen entering the House of Wonders rose to ten, rather than the eight who had been definitely reported missing. It goes without saying that the Chief Constable and others made a very unpleasant but convincing assumption that it hadn’t been a doll which PC’s Hicks and Stanley had glimpsed clasped tightly in the short suspect’s arms.”

And that was pretty much all Mr. Donovan could tell me. Not something you expect to hear of a seaside town’s history, and certainly not something they’re ever likely to broadcast. An attraction that would be exactly the opposite should it still have been standing there! I remember pausing to look at the piles of rubble, bricks and rotting timber after I’d been told this; a scene of utter devastation and a blasted eyesore. I’ve since heard it was never actually rebuilt on, but turned into a bland if functional car park.

So what became of Spangler’s House of Wonders after the second move in its strange and chequered history? It appears that Hawkins moved inland, and rented a farmhouse in Leicestershire, where for the next few years his exhibits were mothballed and put into storage in the farm’s large outbuildings and barns. He’d intended to re-open after the war somewhere else on the coast, miles from where he’d been originally of course, but he was taken ill in early 1945 and died a few weeks before VE Day. It was his son who finally resurrected the exhibition; only it never found a permanent home again but rather became a Travelling Show. Hawkins junior bought some vehicles, carts and tents—of which there was a large stock of ex-military surplus going at very reasonable prices at that time—and right up until his death in 1959 he was on the road with his exhibition up and down the country, throughout the summer and winter months, often working alongside and collaborating with and setting up next to the itinerant circuses and travelling fairgrounds who toured the British Isles in such profusion then. Naturally, an operation like this couldn’t run on the father and son routine of the past, not that the younger Hawkins had a son or any family to help him; so there were a few drivers and labourers hired, mostly men of a wandering and transient nature of course. It seems that most were more footloose and of a vagabond leaning than was usual with Spangler’s as their employer however, for none seemed to stay for more than a few months and many left within just weeks—some without even claiming their rightful wages it was said.

It seems that the bad odour and dark reputation of Spangler’s followed it from both its early years in the stews and slums of London, where admittedly, little was known of the nature of its departure and transfer, and the seaside resort on the Norfolk coast the details of which I’ve described. Of course, the nomadic and roving nature of the business naturally earned it the kind of mystique not to be totally unexpected—what perhaps was more disturbing were the stories of dead farm livestock in remote areas where the show had been in the vicinity—cattle, sheep, goats, even indeed the foxes and predators blamed for the deaths, found torn and bloodied in fields and woodland, the subjects of sustained and frenzied attacks. Worse than this were the actual people; of whom six women and two men were found in various rural areas between the years 1947 and 1958, similarly attacked but with no common motive or thread running through them other than the presence of the travelling show in the area at the times of their deaths. There were various investigations by the police of course, but with nothing firm to go on they invariably came to nothing. Human post-mortems are of course more thoroughly conducted than animal ones, and one common factor did emerge from these; all the unfortunate victims had suffered quite horrible injuries and their blood loss was acute, notwithstanding the severity of their wounds.

Mr. Hawkins Junior was taken ill during early 1959, and as his condition worsened the travelling show made its progress back to the farm from where it had been stored, and there its casual employees were paid off and Spangler’s mothballed once more. Hawkins died later that year, intestate and reclusive, taking any knowledge he might have had about the business and its history to the grave with him. The collection of curiosities which had been Spangler’s stock in trade were sold off at an auction held on the premises by the agents and trustees of the estate, some to private collectors, a few to museums, and all of the amusement arcade machines to John Wildman, the friend of Jack who I mentioned earlier—and this is where the story I’m telling you gets really curious.

Stevenson paused to repack his battered briar pipe bowl with his noisome flake tobacco, taking his time and lighting it up in the considered, leisurely way he always adopts having aroused my interest fully. The pipe lit to his satisfaction and blowing out blue-grey smoke rings, he continued.

Wildman attended the auction when it was held in 1961. Believe it or not there wasn’t a great deal of interest in coin operated amusement machines back then, and he bid and purchased every last one of them, some twenty-four in number. More than half of them were early but run of the mill one-arm bandits and the spring bagatelle type machines, as well as a more recent automated fortune teller and “Laughing Sailor” in a glass booth. There were also eight of the more interesting and elaborate “Working Models,” all turn of the century stuff and quite quaint, but in various states of repair and poor maintenance and rather unfashionable at that time. The last machine was the rather curious “What the Butler Saw” booth which I remembered seeing on my visit to the House of Wonders as a child. Whether the machine had ever received a repair during the long interval when I saw it there and by the time it stood as a multiple lot at the auction I can’t say; all I do know is that when Wildman bought it, it still wasn’t working and a faded “Out of Order” sign was still attached to it by some rusty drawing pins in its shabby, varnish peeling wood frame. This didn’t worry Wildman at all, as he was very hands on, experienced in both clock-making, and engineering, being a very skilled craftsman and mechanic. He’d made a good living repairing motor cars, clocks and watches, owning as he did both a garage and a small jeweller’s shop in Stafford. His spare time was devoted to collecting and repairing old fairground and amusement machines, so the job lot bought from the auction for less than a hundred pounds would you believe, was grist to the mill for him.

Over the course of the next few years Wildman painstakingly restored and repaired those amusement machines. He was of course a busy man, what with the running of his two businesses, and time was often at a premium and he wasn’t a man to cut corners. His labour of love eventually restored all the fruit machines and working models back to their former glory, and he was always happy to show interested visitors his collection whenever the opportunity arose. It was in this way that Jack Froston came to know John Wildman, through a chance encounter at a vintage car rally; Jack had a couple of early MG’s he used to show of course. Well, the two of them got chatting and Jack happened to mention he was writing Showmen of England—and that was how a short while after he was being shown around Wildman’s private collection, and making a few notes and taking some photographs for his intended chapter on Spangler’s House of Wonders.

Jack never made it very clear to me how much he already knew about Spangler’s, but I got the impression he’d probably heard as much, if not more than I had. We never really discussed its past history in any detail, and as by the time I heard what I’m telling you now Jack was in a very bad way, I thought it best not to. One thing’s certain; John Wildman was pretty ignorant of the whole affair, and as Jack hardly intended writing about dark and unsubstantiated rumours and lurid unpleasantness in what was basically going to be a “coffee-table book,” he didn’t feel any need or reason to enlighten his new friend. Jack told me he’d actually made a pretty disturbing and startling discovery about Spangler’s elsewhere before his visit to Wildman—but I’ll come to that in its proper place; if I’m truthful I’m not sure any of it makes any real sense.

Well, there the two of them were, on a Sunday afternoon: Jack was enthusing in all the right ways to Wildman, making notes, taking pictures, and dropping coins in slots to watch An English Execution and The Castle of Phantoms when he came to the dismantled casing and internal workings of The Secrets of our Past lying in confusion on a bench in one untidy corner.

“Work in progress,” Wildman smiled in explanation. “I’ve left it till last as it won’t take that long to put right. Yes, it does look a mess, but it’s an orderly one I can assure you. The photograph drums seem to be undamaged and it’s really just in need of a thorough clean—not been working for many a long year.” He laughed again at Jack’s keen curiosity and questions. “Yes, it sounds very intriguing and frightening doesn’t it? No—that’s not what’s put me off! Typical showman’s patter and rhetoric: I’m sure it will be pretty tame and hardly live up to its spine-chilling billing and warning. We’ll know soon enough. I should have it up and running in about a month and when I have, I’ll let you know and you can have the honour of dropping the first old penny in the slot and taking a look. How’s that?”

For some reason Jack couldn’t explain at the time he actually wasn’t keen on Wildman’s well intentioned and generous offer at all. He didn’t say so of course, and he left shortly after. He continued writing his new book, but his usual zest and enthusiasm seemed to have waned somewhat, notwithstanding the copious notes and photographs he’d made and taken of Wildman’s collection; and it was with a sense of relief that he eventually put the manuscript of the chapter about Spangler’s with the rest of the finished book, his only task to amend it before sending it off to his publisher. The very next day Wildman telephoned him, and informed him that he’d got the amusement machine back in working order and would he like the first look at it?

Which was how Froston found himself back over in the large outhouse which Wildman used as his private museum and workshop, as his friend, with a touch of the theatrical, unveiled his latest restoration by tugging off the large white dustsheet which shrouded it.

“It looks different to what it did the last time you saw it, eh?” Wildman beamed, hoping for a positive response from Jack. “It’s quite an early machine—I actually found the maker’s label inside dated 1892. I’ve not actually seen anything quite like this before; yes, that’s the viewing aperture and you push that pointer-lever device across to which show you want to see. I think they’re in the right order but it was very difficult because the plate drums aren’t identified anywhere and the poor state of the photographic images discouraged me from trying to take them apart. They’re very tightly packed to produce the illusion of a moving picture, you see. Ingenious stuff, and it’s all clockwork, ratchet and pinion power. Want to try The Death of Thomas a’Beckett? or Murder in the Red Barn’? There’s ten to choose from but they’re all Penny Dreadful stuff I’m afraid.”

Jack smiled and looked at the choice illustrated by a small series of garish and crudely drawn plates under the viewing aperture. He moved the pointer to Spring Heeled Jack at Large but then, intrigued by the final plate which was more badly scratched and damaged than the rest, he moved the pointer to that and dropped in his penny, stepping up close to view the show. There was a click and a slight whirring sound as the coin activated the old mechanism, and for a few moments nothing but an impenetrable blackness could be seen yet the machine was turning the photographic drum reel from its low racketing noise. Jack was just beginning to think that either whatever illuminated the photographs had failed or there was some other technical problem his friend had overlooked, when slowly the blackness began to lighten into dim and indistinct shapes; a grey and dismal row of tenement rooftops and chimney stacks came into flickering view as with the sudden pale light of an early dawn morning, and the panorama lowered and widened, disclosing a grimy uncared for terrace of brick built dwellings in a shabby and unidentified street, the pavements damp with early morning rain. Someone, a woman in long skirts and bonnet it appeared, hurried in the jerky, stop motion effect of the crude cinematography along this slum thoroughfare, pausing with frequent regularity to look behind her. Jack told me he was actually smiling at the quaint crudeness and unengaging naivety of the vignette at this moment—but what followed made him smile no longer. Another figure had appeared in the frame from the direction the woman had first taken; short of stature and muffled in an enveloping cloth hood and cape which reached to its ankles. Those ankles could be vaguely discerned at the ragged raw hem of the cloak as they almost skipped and hopped in the most disturbing fashion, and both ankles and feet which appeared naked had a thin and wasted look to them as they pattered horribly along the wet pavement. The woman, now having noticed what was behind her, began to run—not with the theatrical angst and exaggerated histrionics one might have expected from an early staged melodrama—but with a look of sheer terror upon her face. Whatever pursued her moved swiftly, closing the gap between them in short moments, its hood bobbing over a head mercifully obscured but with straggling white wisps of hair escaping from it and a suggestion of long white sharp teeth in the lower portion of a face momentarily exposed. A hand, as thin as the ankles and feet, emerged from the folds of the cloak as it sped along, raising a sharp and cruel looking knife of unusual design. The vignette darkened again, and Jack stepped away from the antique viewfinder, a cold sweat on his brow and actually finding himself shaking.

“It’s got a bit longer to run,” Wildman said, listening to the drum still turning in the machine and oblivious to his friend’s discomposure.

“I’ve seen enough, thanks,” Jack replied. “John, I don’t like your new toy very much if I’m honest. What I’ve just watched there is really creepy, not to say disturbing. I can’t believe all the drums are like that one. If they are, I would get rid of the thing or destroy the photographs in the drums and find something to replace them with. If you don’t, you’ll be having nightmares for the rest of your natural.”

Wildman laughed off Jack’s remarks. “The Fright of your Life! View at your Peril!” he chuckled making his voice eerily hollow. “Does what it says on the tin, then? I thought you were made of sterner stuff than our Edwardian forebears, Jack?”

Jack was annoyed at Wildman’s good natured ribbing as well as still frightened by what he’d witnessed. “I’m quite serious John. There’s something not right about that thing. You be very careful with it and I’d think of moving it on if I were you.”

The vintage arcade machine stopped whirring and fell silent once more as he finished his sentence. Wildman saw his friend off with the remark—“You probably missed the best bit”—which didn’t amuse Jack at all. When he recounted all this to me at our last meeting, he reckoned that for almost a fortnight afterwards he had recurring and unpleasant dreams about that old arcade machine and what he’d seen.

“That figure was truly the stuff of nightmares,” I remember him saying between copious mouthfuls of neat Scotch. “And believe me when I say I’ll never get its foul image out of my mind.” Of course I tried to make light of the matter, suggesting overwork and stress, but Jack wasn’t having any of it. “You didn’t see it, thank God,” he told me lighting another cigarette from the burnt down butt of the one he’d been nervously smoking. “But this I know. That series of horrible photographs, however they were done, weren’t acted out or carefully stage managed—they were a record of some awful event in real life, something that actually happened—of that I’m certain.”

It was impossible to get Jack to see it any other way, and of course I had to tread carefully as his wife had died suddenly in a car accident a few weeks after the visit to John Wildman’s. That had been a tragic and odd business in itself. Janice had always been a careful driver and she’d swerved off the road late one evening returning from dropping some chapters of Showmen of England to Jack’s publisher in Stafford. A couple following in their car behind witnessed what happened and thought she’d tried to avoid what looked like a smallish child who appeared to be standing in the road and which they themselves caught a fleeting glimpse of in their headlights. Janice’s car hit a hedge and then a tree and she was killed outright. The couple stopped of course and tried to help her but there was nothing they could do. There was no sign of any child and an odd thing emerged at the post-mortem. Janice’s injuries, though serious, hadn’t been the cause of her death; sudden heart failure was recorded, and the coroner put that down to major and traumatic shock arising from the accident. Perhaps odder were the manuscript pages scattered on the passenger seat. They were the pages dealing with Spangler’s, and that was when Jack made the decision to withdraw that chapter of the book.

“Janice was both reliable and totally thorough,” he’d told me. “She wouldn’t have left part of the manuscript in the car and brought it back with her so what was it doing in there? No one’s going to explain that.”

Jack was devoted to Janice of course, and he really started on a downhill trend after her death. As I’ve said, I was one of the few he’d really open up to, and at our last meeting he also told me about John Wildman, who died about two months after Janice. Wildman had viewed all the drums in the arcade machine except the final one he understood from telephone conversations, and his friend had been reassuring him that they were all pretty tame period melodramas with poor sets and poorer actors.

“I’m saving the shocker until last,” he’d tell Jack humorously. “I’m going to savour that one—on my own at night to add to the atmosphere of course,” he joked, despite Jack’s protestations.

About a week later Jack answered his door late at night to an unexpected and visibly frightened visitor who was none other than John Wildman himself. He almost collapsed into Jack’s arms, he told me, and it was some time before he could collect himself to speak.

“I was a fool—a bloody fool—I should have listened to you,” he said finally, his face drained of all colour and his eyes darting about him in a frantic and searching manner. “I don’t know what to do now—what have I done? I watched that last drum of pictures earlier; like you I didn’t get to the end, but I saw more than you did. Worse than that, what I saw didn’t appear the same as what you described to me. It started in a similar way—but that figure you described—it turned and seemed to be looking at the viewing aperture, directly into my eyes . . . It came towards where I was standing looking at it. My God, I saw its face, its eyes and its teeth . . . and the long knife it carried. I jumped back, something was moving inside the machine and it started scratching the panels in there. The glass broke in the viewing box. I ran then, and how I’ve driven here I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s in the machine or God help me, it was. You’ve locked the front door? Are all the other doors and windows secured? I daren’t leave here until morning.”

Jack swore that the two of them spent a long and uncomfortable night drinking whisky in front of his living room fire, starting at every nocturnal noise that they heard through the long small hours. Whether the snuffling and scraping sounds around the curtained windows they heard around an hour after John Wildman’s arrival were a collective symptom of overwrought imaginations he couldn’t say, only that they were real enough to them to preclude any further investigation to their reality or otherwise. The following morning, Wildman left in his car without a word while Jack was making some tea for them; and it was later that same day that he heard that his friend was dead, having been found drowned and floating in the local reservoir close to his abandoned vehicle. Coroner’s verdict—Death by suicide while of unsound mind.

Stevenson refilled and lit his scarred old pipe once again. He looked down at the newspaper lying on his lap as though deep in thought and past memories. “Well, and now poor old Jack has died,” he said finally. “I just hope that his passing at least was peaceful. Strange story, don’t you think?”

“Very strange,” I replied, lighting a cigarette to combat the foul smell of my friend’s tobacco. “And more loose ends than an old piece of frayed rope. Are you deliberately holding something back in that annoying way of yours, or is there a rational explanation to all that you’ve told me?”

Stevenson grimaced and blew a series of smoke rings which eddied and dispersed on the summer breeze. “True stories often have loose ends,” he said. “So why should this be different? I can tell you a few more facts that I discovered after what Jack had told me and one of them was this. You know the carpark I mentioned earlier that was put on the site of Spangler’s in that East Coast resort? A portion of it collapsed earlier this year—I read the newspapers unlike you—and what do you think they found underneath? Long forgotten cellars, that’s what, dating back to well before the Georgian house that had stood there. A lot of unidentified human remains and bones too; mostly adults but one of a small child. Of course, that stirred up a lot of the old stories and a museum in Oxford got in touch with the paper, mentioning some exhibits that it had purchased from the Hawkins estate sale back in the ’60s. They’d recently been recovered from long storage, and one of them was of a very shrivelled and almost black dwarf-like corpse in a dusty glass case, with sparse white hair, unusually long incisor teeth, and the remnants of a woollen shroud or cloak about it. Apparently it wasn’t labelled but appeared to have had a wooden stave or post driven through its chest at some time for an unknown reason. Well, some clumsy idiot cracked the glass leaning on it, and the whole thing crumbled to dust within minutes of the air getting to it. It begs the question of what exactly the pygmy-like corpse was and when and who rammed a stake through it and for what rational reason? Jack reckoned that Spangler collected some very odd items for his exhibition and this was something obviously passed on to Hawkins and Son.”

Stevenson tapped out his pipe on his garden chair. “You’re quite right about my own sense of the dramatic of course,” he said, “Which is why I didn’t mention the title of that peepshow Jack and Wildman witnessed. It was The Whitechapel Horrors and Murders Exposed! Is that why Spangler handed over his House of Wonders to Hawkins at the end of 1888? Was he implicated in the Ripper murders even if just as an accessory to one of his more exotic exhibits? You talk of loose ends. Speaking personally I have no wish to delve further. For all I know I could have said more than I should have about the matter for my own safety already—something dreadful lurked in Spangler’s House of Wonders for sure—and I feel it was something living, or at least half living and keeping an existence both furtive and horrible until someone decided to end its privations. Hawkins Junior shortly before his death would be my guess. After that . . . can vampires become ghosts? Ghosts who still want to remain in darkness and keep their dreadful secrets? . . .”

Stevenson gave me a searching stare and then a grim smile before leaning back in his chair and draping the newspaper over his face to snooze. I left him to it, going for a stiff drink in the house, for the sun had clouded over in the last few minutes and the air had turned distinctly chillier.