The Laxham Haunting (The John Lymington SciFi/Horror Library #18)

By John Lymington

Ever since Ludwig was a boy he had been experiencing something strange in his home in Augsburg, Germany. But that was hardly surprising to many, because Ludwig's grandfather had been the local eccentric.

But one day, his grandfather's experiments got out of hand and the whole house was gripped by some incredibly strong external force—and Ludwig only just survived to tell the tale.

Many years later, when David Howard arrives at Laxham Rectory (where Ludwig's grandfather had spent his childhood) to take up his new post as curate, he is immediately aware of the strange sensations that fill the building. The village is rife with rumours of the light that seems to emanate from the rectory and even the vicar, not to mention his wife and daughter, are unusually tense and expectant. And when, for no apparent reason, a wall of the rectory collapses, leaving a single brick suspended in mid-air, everybody realises that the power surrounding them is of no earthly origin.

But David Howard is sure that is only the beginning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Dec 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215040195

John Lymington

John Richard Newton Chance was born in Streatham Hill, London, in 1911, the son of Dick Chance, a managing editor at the Amalgamated Press. He studied to become a civil engineer, and then took up quantity surveying, but gave it up at 21 to become a full-time writer. He wrote for his father's titles, including "Dane, the Dog Detective" for Illustrated Chips, and a number of stories for the Sexton Blake Library and The Thriller Library.He went on to write over 150 science fiction, mystery and children's books and numerous short stories under various names, including John Lymington, John Drummond, David C. Newton, Jonathan Chance and Desmond Reid. Including 20+ SF potboilers, adding that he "made a steady income by delivering thrillers to Robert Hale (the UK publisher) at a chapter a week".His novel Night of the Big Heat was adapted to television in 1960 and to film, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in 1967.

Book preview

Augsburg

LUDWIG VON PRIEN had all the makings of an eccentric. His mother was an Italian Contessa whose Conti had gone off to explore the Amazon leaving an Amazon to be explored. Kurt von Prien, Ludwig’s father, a traveller in Benz motor cars, machine guns and German champagne, fell under her very strong spell and tempestuous physical assaults, from which she became pregnant. Irritated by this she was yet confident of her strength of will, and concentrated her mind on dispelling the pregnancy. Ludwig was born in Vienna, and enraged by frustration and weakness the Contessa went back alone to Rome determined to become a nun by the time she was sixty.

Kurt had a Hungarian girlfriend, Lotti Tilsch, who had just lost a baby and she took on Ludwig and suckled him with milk laced with champagne, then raised him with all the love, attention and discipline which she had learnt in the most exclusive brothel in Vienna.

When war came, Kurt was called away to fulfil his duties as an officer in the Uhlans, which made him apprehensive, so he installed Lotti and Ludwig with his parents in Augsburg, in Germany.

Otto von Prien, Ludwig’s grandfather, was a railway engineer with a hobby of astronomy and the supernatural, subjects he classed together on the grounds that mankind did not understand either. He had married Marie de Sade, a granddaughter of the French writer and a woman of moods, given to playing hours of weltschmerzmuzik on the cello and having sudden urges to commit atrocities by running through blood oranges with knitting needles. When little Ludwig came to live with them in Augsburg she would give him blood oranges and watch him eat them with the shining eye and eager fang of a vampire. She carried out her wifely duties erratically and on occasion, overcome by nervous pressures, locked herself in cupboards around the house then beat on the doors and screamed to be let out.

She needs more attention, the doctor had told Otto, who replied, But she never goes out to get any, so what can I do?

When Kurt brought Lotti and Ludwig to live with his parents, Marie locked herself in her bedroom for a fortnight, and it was only when she was told through the door panels that Kurt had not married Lotti that she came out. She then proceeded to behave as if nothing had happened.

Lotti was puzzled as to how the lady survived without food for such long periods until she discovered Otto one night, shuffling along the corridors in his slippers and carrying a satchel from which he replenished food stocks in the cupboards and in any room Marie was likely to use to lock herself in. Otto never mentioned this service and Marie always pretended not to notice it.

By then Lotti’s sympathy was all with Otto. She thought Marie was mad. The little boy did not find anything strange about his grandmother, but thought locking oneself up in cupboards and living off iron rations a very adventurous thing to do.

But it was Otto who caught his imagination. Otto had a study, a huge room with big desks and cabinets and glass cases and a big shiny heater in one corner like an Egyptian tomb in a fairground. Ludwig always thought there was somebody dead inside it.

Around the room were pictures and models of engines, locomotives, bridges and all kinds of shining machines and a big world you could spin like mad till it started grunting and shifting about the floor.

As he got older Otto took him into the study more and began to talk about the stars, and little people living on them, like mice on floating currant buns; and Ludwig would sit on the floor on a cushion listening to the quiet voice until he went floating away on his own cushion right out of the world altogether to say hallo to the mice and raise his top hat to a specially big currant bun.

But then Marie would fuss and say, Filling the boy’s head with nonsense when what he wants is food, and she filled him with food, and Ludwig liked that, too, but Marie got to doing it locked in the bathroom because Lotti tried to stop too much of it, saying Ludwig was going fat and pasty faced.

Kurt came back and took Lotti away for a holiday, whereupon Marie went down to the river, waited until a number of people were walking on the bank and there was a man fishing from a boat in midstream, then screamed and threw herself in.

The strollers on the bank watched with interest and the man in the boat pushed out an oar for her to get hold of. She was in such a state of panic that she just beat about and tried to scream in earnest but only swallowed water. The boatman saw she would drown herself if she went on so, and smacked her over the head with the oar, then steered her to the side of the boat where he could haul her out by the collar of her coat.

After that incident the doctor advised Otto to think carefully about having her put away. Otto considered this gravely and then advanced a long and devious argument which proved in the end that, as he had married Marie, he should be put away.

Then he laughed and the doctor lost his temper. It was a long time between laughs then, for the Imperial Empire had gone and defeat and depression affected Otto more than trivial matters in and about the home. He began to talk to the boy about the great days of Imperial Germany, but Ludwig wanted to talk about stars and the vast freedom of the dark skies at right.

It was at the time of the depression, when Otto’s engineering had come to be a consultancy, that Otto spent more and more time on his earlier studies of supernatural forces.

The house in Augsburg had always been known for its noises by night and things toppling, which weaker persons put down to a poltergeist but which Otto was sure indicated some great natural force somewhere in the earth around the town.

His work on the Manchurian Railway had brought him in to contact with the theories of force lines, Yinyang, the Dragons and other beliefs in the directive powers of natural forces. Otto was a man who tended automatically to believe what the mass disbelieved. If the Lumpen thought a thing not possible, Otto thought the opposite. He was later to be classified as bloody-minded, but as he told the growing boy, "If we all are satisfied to believe the same thing, no one is going to find out anything about that thing. You must doubt, and even if, in the end, you prove the others are right, you have at least learned why."

That was one of the times he spoke directly to the listening boy, but Ludwig had the impression more and more that the old man was talking to himself. Sometimes Ludwig went and touched the model engines and looked at the pictures and even spun the big world in its skeleton eggcup and the old man just talked on as if nobody was there. Ludwig felt sad, a little angry, a little lost.

Lotti and Kurt went away for long periods, and in those Marie began to treat the boy as some kind of conspirator. She whispered things as if someone might be listening over her shoulder; she nodded, winked solemnly and made mysterious gestures, so that Ludwig kept sitting forward and saying. Why? and What? and Who? and Where? He fought a boy in the town who made a screw loose gesture with finger to temple about his grandmother. They made it up and became friends after which Ludwig said, Of course she’s barmy. I bet she’s the barmiest person in the whole world.

He had gone to school then, and it was about that time, when Otto was more and more alone in his study, that the house really began to come alive. Marie’s cupboard escapism became more frequent, there were noises—Giants walking in the passage at night, Ludwig said to his friends—Well, didn’t you go and knock, they said, and he said, I did once but there was an awful great roar and I shut the door again. It nearly blew my head off. I daren’t look since.

Marie told him, He is here—in this house. Your grandfather has brought him here. Oh dear, what shall we do? And Ludwig asked. Who? but got no answer and he realised that she, like Otto, was not really talking to him anymore but just talking.

At times like that he wished Lotti would come back, but she had been gone so long then that he was beginning to forget her, except when he was frightened of something.

The tension growing between his grandparents became a live thing and frightened him more. They did not speak to each other, or swear or argue, but he could feel a wrong air when they were together, and especially when Otto was in his study and had locked the door.

And then suddenly Kurt turned up from where he had been selling steel rails in Guatemala. Ludwig realised from what he said to Marie that she had written and told him to come home because something awful was happening.

Kurt went and saw Otto in his study and asked what was the matter.

I have to admit to myself at long last that your mother has been mad for years. She has invented one obsession after another. Now it is that she thinks I am trying to bring up the Devil, and peers through the windows, the keyhole or a crack at the door when I am working in my study. She will soon be driving me as mad as she.

But she always did say the house was haunted. Has she just elaborated the ghost into Lucifer? It’s so long since I was here. You used to experiment with the forces in the house. Do you still do that?

You remember the things tumbling and knocking together, flying about, especially in the night? It was put down to a poltergeist, but I have gone much farther than that. I have discovered that it is a force that can be used. I have constructed a small machine which will lift objects at the times of the manifestations. You see, I have got that far.

But where did you get that idea?

It is impossible to build the pyramids by any means we know of. So I tried to think of other means. Then, when I was in China, I was interested in their belief that the male or positive electric force flows along the mountain ridges and the negative or female, through the valleys. Though they knew this they could not put it to any practical use—

But about mother.

"Ah, yes—Well, this peering and prying wearied me and at last I thought the best thing was to take her into my confidence and show her the machine working. She screamed. She shouted, ‘I don’t want to see him—I won’t let you bring him here—!’ She fled and locked herself in a cupboard.

I then worried that she might take an axe to my machine when I was out, so I came to locking my study when I went. That made it worse. She imagined more fearful things. She began burning incense, spraying garlic water everywhere, walking about with a crucifix held up like a candle—I can’t remember all the insane things exactly. Sometimes it has brought me to a point of having her sent away and then somehow she has calmed again—

Is she genuinely frightened or jealous? Kurt said. Jealous of you spending all your time for years on this one thing?

How is that possible?

I don’t know, but sometimes 1 think women aren’t possible, either.

During that visit Kurt arranged for Ludwig to go away to school, perhaps to get him away from the house, and, although he might have been dissatisfied with the home environment from a formative point of view, he had no intention of taking the boy back with him to Guatemala. Ludwig asked eagerly how Lotti was, Kurt just said, She’s very well, and when asked when she would come back said, Soon, perhaps. And in between being excited about the school, which Kurt said was so fine, he cried into his pillow about Lotti.

And all the time when, ghosts, poltergeists and other knick-knacks of the night were ignored, Marie fed Ludwig like a prize piggy.

School and then university took him away and life in the house in Augsburg, though remaining his, was not so much of him. When he stayed there it was usually quiet, but once, when he broke a leg, he was there in June and the noises in the night were terrifying, so that even Marie’s screaming was like a background to a thunderstorm.

It brought back a sudden shocking reality to what had begun to seem unreal to him.

Then Marie locked herself in a cupboard for the last time and died. And after she had gone Otto still felt her eye peering through the study keyhole, or at the corner of a window, or between the ventilator slats in the wall, and he still locked the door when he went out.

And in the night, the very old man shuffled along the corridors with his ragged, faded satchel and put provisions in the cupboards, seeming not to notice how the piles grew.

But his devotion lasted only seven months, and one morning he was found dead, not in his beloved study, but in her music room where the cello still leaned against her chair.

KURT AND LUDWIG went to the funeral from the house in Augsburg. Kurt hated funerals. He feared a procession of Otto’s old friends, staggering round the grave festooned with ear trumpets, pebble glasses, crutches, wheelchairs and even attendant nurses; but Otto had been too old. There were no friends left, and Kurt and his son went back to the house alone.

Kurt was then living with a Turkish woman in Stamboul and was keen to get back and away from this house. He looked closely at his reflection in the wall mirror in the hall, and said, I married Lotti, you know. It was fatal. Six months and she was gone. Where the hell is Priestmann?

Lawyer Priestmann came, drank port and read through an extraordinarily wearisome tract during which Kurt dozed off and which in the end meant only that Ludwig was willed the house and an income from a very old Manchurian investment originally financed in New York and payable in dollars. The capital and interest had been untouched for fifty-seven years and therefore the statement in the will which said, ‘which should bring him in $300 a year’ in fact brought in $35,000 a year when Ludwig got down to it. Kurt inherited the rest of the estate, which he there and then legally passed over to Ludwig to help with the $300 a year.

Money is not important, he said, dressing to go. I have plenty. He put on his hat. Goodbye Ludwig.

Goodbye, Father. I will write to you as usual.

Kurt was about to go out of the door when he stopped and turned back.

Will you live here, then? he said, surprised.

Well, he wanted that, I know.

But he’s dead.

Perhaps.

LUDWIG TURNED AND went away into Otto’s study. He shut the door and stood there for some time, feeling the old man’s presence. He went round, looking at everything, the pictures, ornaments, models, the papers in the desk, the weird machine called the Sternkite which stood on top of the chest of papers which told why it had been built at all.

Ludwig lifted the machine away, opened the chest and began to read. Three days later he was