Confessions from a Haunted House. Timothy Lea
ONE
Yes! I’m back. And before I go any further I would like to say a word to all those people who sat down to write a letter begging me to produce another book: why did I never hear from you? I suppose something came up on the telly or your pencil broke? You did not know the address? Excuses, excuses. If you really cared you’d have done something about it instead of leaving everything to mum and her sandwich board. Up and down, up and down, outside the publishers. Her poor old feet wore a groove in the pavement. ‘Bring back Timothy Lea’ it said on one side of the board, ‘Millions morn’ on the other. She meant to say ‘Mourn’ but spelling was never her strong point. Seeing a chance to cash in on some free advertising, the publishers rushed out a book called Million’s Morn and made a small fortune. They are very sharp, publishers. Anyway, in the end they reckoned that she was letting the tone of the place down and gave in, so here I am. Thank you, mum.
Actually, what brought me back was not the chance of making a few bob [Pull the other one! Editor] but my desire to tell the world about a really astonishing series of events that completely reshaped my belief in the supernatural – or rather, my disbelief in the supernatural. Incidentaly, if you think that Supernatural is a brand of petrol, this is not the book for you. I must warn anyone who is squeamish or scares easily that they’d better not read this book. Some of the things that I am going to describe would make hair stand up on Yul Brynner’s nut. I can hardly believe them myself and yet I was there. Yes! Actually there. Hold on a minute, once more my hands are beginning to shake uncontrollably. Don’t worry, the spasm will soon pass. It is just that the memory of these terrifying events is still too close for comfort. There, that’s better. Now I can start tapping the typewriter without getting my digits wedged between the keys. The question is: Where do I start? [How about at the beginning? Editor]. I am sorry about these interruptions but I have a new, young editor and he does like to get ‘involved’.
Anyway, I think the best point of departure is about the time that the Noglea Emergency Service folded. ‘Folded’ is perhaps the wrong word as I will explain later. Mention of the word Noglea may remind old readers of the existence of my brother-in-law and partner, one Sidney Noggett, Clapham’s answer to Paul Newman and husband to my sister Rosie. This was about the time, too, that Sid tried to sell the ancestral home of the Leas, 17 Scraggs Lane, to a rich Arab sheik as a hunting lodge. However, the deal fell through – at about the same time as the attic floor. It was the weight of all the wives trooping in to look into the water tank. Sid had described it as a general purpose washing machine and camel trough and was flogging it as an extra. Anyway, it ended up in Mum and Dad’s bedroom along with everybody else and that was that little deal kiboshed. It nearly cost Britain her oil supplies for a couple of months but there was nothing that a few dozen diplomatic notes and a barrel of sheeps’ eyes could not smooth over. After that incident, Sid was not a welcome visitor at Scraggs Lane despite his assurances that he’d been going to set Dad up with his own date farm on the proceeds from the sale. In fact, any mention of Sid’s name and Dad showed all his teeth and made a noise like a whistling kettle boiling over. The failure of this deal and other schemes to separate our Arab brothers from their petro-dollars – the Twelve Hour Yashmak Dry Cleaning Service is a disaster that springs readily to mind (one batch got mixed up with a twelve-hour nappy service with results too horrible to describe) – saw to it that Sid was thrown back on more conventional ways of trying to do very little with even less to make a lot. It was thus that the Noglea Emergency Service was born and I had to repaint the side of the mini-van once again: ‘Disasters are our Business’. Yes, I was a bit sceptical about it myself but whatever else Sid isn’t – and he isn’t lots of things – he is stubborn. An advert in the Yellow Pages – Sid used to think these were for Chinese restaurants and laundries – and we were in business. Quite what business I was never sure. Sid purposely wanted to keep it vague. He said that we would take on some enormous project and then ‘lay it off’, as he described it. This meant getting somebody else to do it and keeping most of the money. He said people were doing it all the time – that we would be performing an ‘entrepreneurial function’. Well, people may have been doing it all the time but we certainly weren’t. The telephone never started ringing. Sid said that it was all due to graft: the gaffers down the town hall were giving jobs to their mates and accepting kick-backs. He said he would never descend to bribery, but next week he took the town hall carpark attendant out for a sandwich and a few beers. It did not do any good though: next time we parked the van in the town hall carpark it was towed away. Sid was choked. He said that the whole edifice of British justice was crumbling and backed the van over the carpark attendant’s moped.
That was where matters stood – or rather, crouched – one evening when the telephone rang and I heard Sid’s agitated voice. ‘Timmy? Something’s come up. It could be very big. Get your mac on and I’ll pick you up in five minutes.’
He put the phone down before I had time to ask him what it was all about and think of a reason why I could not come. I crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain. Sid was not kidding about the mac. It was pouring down. Not only that but chucking great bolts of lightning about. A clap of thunder exploded overhead and I thought that it must be something promising to get Sid out on a night like this. As it so happened, I was wrong.
‘A gas leak?’ I said: ‘You must be kidding!’
Sid squinted through the wipers. ‘We’ve got to put some new rubbers in these things.’
‘Some old rubbers would do,’ I said. ‘Why do you think they make that noise? Two semi-circular pieces of glass are going to drop in our laps at any moment.’
‘Gordon Bennet,’ shouted Sid. ‘I have to do everything, don’t I? Think of the capers, find the jobs, maintain the vehicle—’
‘Tell me more about this job,’ I said, soothingly. ‘We don’t know anything about gas. How’d they get onto us?’
‘They got onto us because they saw our name in the telephone book,’ said Sid. ‘“Emergency Service”, remember? After that I boxed clever. I didn’t let on we had no practical experience of gas leaks.’
‘That was clever? Give me an example of when you’re boxing really badly.’
‘Don’t be so blooming feeble,’ said Sid. ‘All we’ve got to do is find the leak. Then one of us nips out and grabs hold of somebody to fix it. They do the work, we cop most of the mula.’
‘Enough to pay for a nice funeral, I hope,’ I said. ‘I must put my foot down at this point.’
‘Put your foot down on that fag end,’ retorted Sid, indicating a quarter inch of hand-rolled that was smouldering on the floor. ‘And not too hard. There’s only road beneath those rubber mats.’ He was not kidding. Such was the parlous state of Noglea finances that the van – our only asset – was rusting away around us. Much as I disliked the idea of searching for a gas leak I could see that even a job sexing alligators would have to be given serious consideration. The rain was still bucketing down when we found ourselves being waved to a halt by a copper with a flashlight. ‘If he asks for the MOT test we’re up the spout,’ I said.
‘Don’t be a berk,’ said Sid. ‘This is it.’
I looked through the misted-up windscreen and saw that the cops were manning a barrier that shut off one of the approach roads to an enormous block of flats. Lightning flashed and I glimpsed a crowd of people held back by a rope. Some of them were in dressing gowns and slippers, poor sods. They were shivering under umbrellas and had obviously been recently evacuated from their flats. The building itself was hardly smaller than a skyscraper and there was no sign of a light in any of the windows. Another flash and there it was, rising stark and gaunt like Cleopatra’s needle. I had the nasty feeling that we had bitten off more than we could chew.
‘Emergency Service,’ said Sid, crisply.
‘Oh yes.’ The copper’s voice sounded almost apologetic. ‘Anywhere you like, gentlemen. Do you want the crowd moved back?’
‘They’ll be all right like that, officer,’ said Sid, grandly. He wound up the window and ground the gears impressively before pulling up before the main