444

After we ate last night we caught a taxi back to Borley. It must have been fairly obvious what we were up to and as the cab driver unloaded our bags he asked us with a smirk what we were doing.

We didn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer.

The wooden gate to the church creaked as we opened it and we crunched hesitantly up the path. Every sigh of wind in the branches sent my heart racing. We’d missed Mrs. Proudfoot; the church was locked and silent and so we settled ourselves on the grass at the back of the building.

A triangle of glass was missing from the leaded lights adjacent to the Waldegrave tomb, so Lee taped the microphone to the leg of his tripod and pushed it through the gap, resting it on a ledge on the tomb so that it was pointing towards the door. This was at three minutes past midnight, and exactly thirty minutes later we recorded a very loud bang—“like a desk lid being dropped” said Lee—followed by a noise like the dropping of tin tacks or the rustle of paper.

We also captured numerous other noises. One in particular, that sounded like the ‘tock’ of a grandfather clock, we heard repeatedly. Another noise was reminiscent of a bottle or jug full of liquid being set down. For the next four hours we took turns at listening through the headphones to the hiss of the tape in the empty church. We fell asleep at about half four as the sky turned from black to grey and then to blue.

I woke up feeling shattered, a new day to be faced with weariness. The sun shone from a clear sky, but I just wanted a warm clean bed to sleep in. Michael looked terrible; half dead, grey like a corpse, huddled on the grass in his grubby overcoat, hands in pockets, his sunken cheeks drained of colour. All he needed was an empty cider bottle beside his prostrate form and the scene would’ve been complete.

We hid our things beneath a tree and set off for Sudbury and a meal at the Casa André and a trek round the town buying provisions. We were overcome by weariness but trailed back to Borley via Brundon and the ex-railway line to find a slight dark-haired man holding court to a dozen or so people in the church, telling them in a documentary style voice of the legend, and reeling off dates and names with textbook thoroughness.

He introduced himself to us—he was a self-proclaimed “Borley researcher,” Richard Vandendale—and told us he had a letter in his pocket that gave him permission to visit the Rectory site itself. Would we like to come along?

We followed him across the road to the Cottage and he was gone a long time. Eventually he came breathlessly back to tell us that the owner of the house would give us a look at “the last surviving relics of Borley Rectory” if we’d donate £1.00 to the church funds. Jeremy reluctantly coughed up, and we trooped next door to the back of the bungalow where an elderly man in shorts greeted us.

“The gateposts of Borley Rectory” he announced, pointing to two tall wooden posts leaning (and almost pushing over) his prefab garage. And sure enough, there they were. Mr. Vandendale confirmed this, comparing them with a photograph he had which showed the Rectory drive way, gate posts in situ. They stood against the garage wall—enormous, weathered, split and green with age, like two religious relics.

Mr. V. enthused about them and rattled on to our host: “Oh, they’re marvelous!” etc. Michael muttered disbelievingly under his breath about the lunacy of paying £1 to see “two sticks” as he put it, and I almost agreed, but on reflection it was worth it. Our host was amused at Mr. V.’s glee and was full of smiling criticism of Harry Price. “He should’ve been shot.”

He told us that he was planning on selling the gateposts to an American who’d been so enthralled that he’d hardly been able to tear himself away. How he plans on taking them to America I don’t know for they must be all of ten, twelve feet high and weigh several hundred pounds. Our host seemed interested in Mr. V.’s photographs, and so while they talked we waited in the road.

We had our permission to visit the site of the Rectory. There’s now nothing to be seen of the enormous building that once stood here and the site is smooth and green and covered in part by fruit trees. A wall crosses the grass (not contemporary with the Rectory apparently), and at the back of this are garages and outbuildings. The Rectory garden has been swallowed up by the gardens of the bungalows which have been built down the road, although a portion of the Nun’s Walk is still in existence in the orchard.

Mr. V. set about determining exactly where the Rectory stood and wandered to and fro across the grass, clearly in his element, but I grew bored and so returned to the church. Lee stayed, and grubbed about in the dirt at the foot of a tree discovering fragments of Victorian pottery, a window sash cord, and a small piece of ornate glass with the numbers 444 embossed on the surface.

There were several people visiting the church and they all seemed very interested in what we were doing. We played them the loud bang we’d recorded the previous night, and I saw them jump at the suddenness of the sound. Mrs. Proudfoot turned up, and Mr. Vandendale ensnared her with a guidebook sermon, but she seemed interested. She told us that a relative of hers used to sit on the church council and attend meetings in the Blue Room at the Rectory.

We unfurled our yards of cable and placed the microphone on the altar, directly in front of the crucifix – “is nothing sacred?” bitched an indignant visitor—and we felt like saying, “not to science, no.” The mike seemed to challenge whatever it is (if anything) that inhabits the church, and to parody the crucifix on the altar. Mrs. Proudfoot locked the door and we were all set. We invited Mr. V. to stay with us but he refused, saying he’d paid £9.50 for a bed in Sudbury and wasn’t about to waste it.

So we’ve settled down in our sleeping bags in the porch to await the dark.