The Ghost Hunters Read Free

wanted to open it immediately I had no wish to do so there, under the curator’s melancholy scrutiny. It seems odd admitting this, for I am not an anxious man and I certainly don’t scare easily, but something in Wesley’s tone had affected me. So much so that I wanted suddenly to escape the suffocation of the eighth floor.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, rising, ‘but I must go now. Thank you. I promise I will read this.’
    I headed back towards the elevator, trying not to look again at the stone bust or the seance chair, choked with its wires.
    ‘Doctor Caxton,’ Wesley called after me. ‘Please, read it immediately. Time is short. Sarah … Miss Grey … she would want you to understand. And if you can, try to forgive …’
    But I was quickening my pace now, unsettled, confused. Forgive what?
    The curator’s icy eyes bored into me.
    And the elevator door closed.
    Academic curiosity compelled me to open the wallet the instant I arrived home in Oxford. The small lock that had kept the papers safe within for so long broke surprisingly easily. I reached inside and slid the bundle of musty handwritten pages onto my desk. There were drawings too: one of a tall, balding man and a photograph of an attractive young woman with elegant bobbed hair. Her gaze pierced me.
    The hour was late. My two little girls were already asleep. When I had made a sandwich and mug of coffee, I told Julia togo up to bed without me. Then I went into my study where the manuscript was waiting on my desk, and closed the door.
    As I read, I was hardly aware of the hours passing, the faded pages seeming to turn themselves; and by the time I was done, the fire beside me had long since died down, its embers glowing like eyes somewhere in the distant past, watching me.
    I hope my readers will understand that I have kept this manuscript secret until now because the personal implications of making it public frightened me. I have many reasons for not wanting to delve deeper into a mystery that has already bemused so many and which, I realise now, helps answer so many questions about my own past: why, since a child, I have felt so lost, so out of step with the rest of life. Perhaps I would have kept the document secret always, as John Wesley requested, had he not shown me a particular letter afterwards – a plea for help on which my own future now depends.
    I have left the narrative exactly as I discovered it. The only additions I have made are the footnotes, which provide further useful background information to the central events of Miss Sarah Grey’s story and occasional commentary on the author’s observations.
    Ultimately, it is for the reader to decide the veracity of Miss Grey’s tale and the significance of its events. But for reasons that will become apparent, I am as certain as I can be that this story is true.
    Dr Robert Caxton
    London, 1977

Miss Sarah Grey’s Manuscript

BORLEY RECTORY ORIGINAL FLOOR PLANS

Part I

The Midnight Inquirer

    ‘An extraordinary man, Price – a most extraordinary man.’

Sir Albion Richardson
    ‘Yes indeed. Look, no strings, no wires attached.’

Harry Price (April 1944)

– 1 –
HARRY
    November 1955, London
    A wise man once told me that for every moment that passes, there is another that might have been – moments we lose through the misfortune of circumstance that slip like sand through our fingers and scatter to the past. Only now, with fear in my heart, do I properly understand what he meant. For now I know what it means to feel the pain of regret, and to wish it gone.
    My name is Sarah Grey. For five years I was the confidential secretary to the late Mr Harry Price, honorary chairman of the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, an organisation that ceased to exist, shortly after the Second World War.
    My duties, in the main, were common enough, but I like to think that Price relied on me. He was a restless man, impatient and sometimes disorganised. The way his mind jumped about like a