Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

There were two pictures, one of them tall and narrow, running alongside the story. This was the Dracula’s Castle shot of the kiln house, doctored for dramatic effect. The other, near the foot of the page, showed an unsmiling Gerard Stock, holding a candle in a holder, his arm around a younger woman with curly hair.

OUR BLACK HELL IN THE HOUSE OF HORROR

by Dave Lang

A terrified couple spoke last night of their haunted hell in the grim old house where a relative was brutally murdered .

And they claimed that a ‘rural mafia’ had condemned them to face the horror alone.

Gerard and Stephanie Stock say their six-month ordeal in the remote converted hop-kiln has driven them to the edge of nervous breakdowns .

But when they asked the local vicar to perform an exorcism, he refused even to enter the house, which is so dark they need lights on all day, even in summer .

The couple inherited the 19th century kiln house near Bromyard in Here-fordshire from Mrs Stock’s uncle, Stewart Ash, the author and photographer who was beaten to death there by burglars less than a year ago .

Since they moved in at the end of last January, the Stocks say they have endured:

• creeping footsteps on the stairs at night .

• strange glowing lights in an abandoned hop-field at the front of the house .

• furniture moving around a bloodstain that won’t go away .

• an apparition of a hazy figure which walks out of solid brick walls .

‘ It’s become a complete nightmare,’ said Mr Stock, a 52-year-old public relations consultant. ‘Everybody locally knows there’s something wrong in this place, but it’s as if there’s a conspiracy of silence. It’s a rural Mafia around here. And now it looks as if even the vicar has been “got at”. ’

Turn to page 2

Prof shook his head slowly.

‘Madness, Laurence.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Nah.’ Prof turned over the page and creased the spine of the paper, laid it back on the packing cases next to his coffee cup, contemptuously punched the crease flat with the heel of a fist. ‘Not in a million frigging years. Let me finish this, and then we’ll talk.’

Lol read the story over Prof’s shoulder.

Mr Stock and his thirty-four-year-old wife say the house has proved impossible to heat, and they’ve built up massive electricity bills, running to hundreds of pounds .

And the already gloomy house was made even darker when neighbouring landowner Adam Lake built two massive barns either side of it, blocking light from all the side windows .

Mr Lake has claimed the buildings were necessary for his farming operation .

But Mr Stock claimed the landowner was furious because both they and Stewart Ash had refused to sell him the house and had the giant barns built to make the haunted kiln impossible to live in .

‘Lake showed up here once,’ Prof said. ‘Made me an offer for this place even though it wasn’t part of his old man’s original estate. Crazy. The guy’s as mad and arrogant as Stock. Dresses like some old-style squire twice his age. Campaigns for fox-hunting. Jesus!’

‘I saw him the other night.’

‘He’s a buffoon. And he don’t fully realize the kind of desperate bastard he’s up against – though maybe he does now.’

‘You really think Stock’s making all this up, to try and publicly shame Lake into moving those barns?’

‘Look,’ Prof said, ‘Stock’s on his uppers, right? Suddenly he gets a break; he wins a house. With problems attached, sure, but it’s a wonderfully unexpected gift, and he’s determined to capitalize. He wants the very maximum he can get. He’s gonna use whatever skills he’s got, whatever contacts. What’s he got to lose? Nothing, not even his credibility. What’s he got to gain? Jesus, those barns go, you can add seventy, eighty thousand to the market value of that place.’

‘Why doesn’t he just sell to Lake for some inflated price and walk away?’

Prof opened out his hands in exasperation. ‘Because he is Gerard Stock .’

‘ That first barn made poor Stewart’s life into a black hell,’ Gerard Stock says. ‘But he was a stubborn man and refused to give in. ’

But Mr Ash’s determined stand was ended the night he surprised two young burglars .

They beat the sixty-six-year-old author to death on the stone floor of his kitchen .

‘ I did not believe in ghosts or hauntings, but I’ve often felt Uncle Stewart’s presence in the kitchen,’ says Mrs Stock. ‘I feel his spirit has been somehow trapped in the darkness of this place. ’

The Stocks approached the local vicar, the Rev. Simon St John, asking him to exorcize their home .

‘ But he didn’t want to know,’ said Mr Stock. ‘He implied that we ought to be looking for psychiatric help. When something like this happens, you become aware of a rural mafia at work. Stewart Ash fell foul of it, and it looks as if we have too .

‘Nobody in the village speaks to us, except other outsiders. I’ve even been refused service in the pub.’

Lol shook his head. ‘He only got thrown out because he was completely pissed and insulting people.’

Prof’s beard jutted. ‘Who was he insulting, Laurence?’

‘Well… Simon. Called him Saint Simon. And other things. Stock said he used to work for TMM when Simon was in a band recording with them.’

‘The Philosopher’s Stone,’ Prof said tonelessly. ‘For your own information, Simon was a classical musician. A session cellist, if you like, and he was brought into this band about twenty years ago. Tom Storey was in it, too, for his sins. I worked with them for a while – for all our sins. It didn’t last.’

‘I think I remember something.’

Prof looked hard at Lol. ‘Whatever you heard, it was probably crap. Whatever Stock said about Simon, you can put it to the back of your mind. For a while, God and music were fighting over Simon, but it was never really a contest. He’s a good man, he loves his music, but he needs his God. And his wife. And whatever else you hear… Simon and Isabel – this is a marriage to die for. You understand?’

‘Whatever you say,’ said Lol, bemused.

‘Of course he refuses to exorcize the house of this despicable scheming bastard! He knows as well as I do that there’s no conceivable basis for this garbage.’

‘Stock asked me if I believed in ghosts,’ Lol said.

Mr Stock added: ‘I never believed in ghosts but after what we’ve witnessed here, it seems to me that the spirit of Stewart Ash cannot rest, even though two young men have been convicted of his murder .

‘ I can’t help feeling that the whole truth has not yet come out and perhaps someone in the area knows more than they’re saying .

‘ We feel very isolated, but we feel we owe it to the memory of Steph’s murdered uncle to see this through. ’

The Rev. Simon St John refused to comment about what he said was ‘a private matter ’.

But Hereford’s diocesan exorcist, the Rev. Merrily Watkins, said last night that she would be looking into the case .

‘ If I was aware of someone in genuine need of spiritual support, I would want to see they received whatever help we were able to give them,’ she said .

‘Pah.’ Prof tossed the paper to the stained stone flags on the floor. ‘He’s trying to stir the shit. It’s what he does. Now they have to try to shore up this nonsensical crap by calling in some stupid woman who doesn’t know Stock from Adam. And then they wonder why—What’s the matter now , Laurence? What is the matter with you this morning?’