The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

  I became aware of Mrs Bazeley and Betty, watching, perhaps beginning to wonder at my delay. I dipped my head to the mouthpiece … And, like Caroline, I heard nothing, only the faint surge and echo of the blood in my ear—sounds which, I suppose, might easily have been translated, by an overwrought imagination, into something more sinister. Straightening up, I laughed at myself.

  ‘I think Miss Caroline had the right idea,’ I said. ‘This tube must be sixty years old, at least! The rubber must be perished; the wind gets in, and makes those whistles. I dare say it’s the wind that’s been setting the bells off, too.’

  Mrs Bazeley looked unconvinced. She said, with a glance at Betty, ‘I dunno, Doctor. This child’s been saying for months that the house has something queer about it. Suppose—’

  ‘This house is falling apart,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s the sad truth, and all there is to it.’

  And to put a stop to the whole business I did what Mrs Bazeley or Caroline, if they had been less distracted, might easily have done for themselves: I tugged the ivory whistle from its chain and put it in my waistcoat pocket, and I replaced it with a cork.

  I assumed that that would be the end of the matter; and for several days, I believe, there was calm in the house. But then, on the following Saturday morning, Mrs Bazeley came into the kitchen as usual and noticed that the tea-cloth, which she had hung back over the speaking-tube after my visit, and which had remained there undisturbed since then, had somehow fallen to the floor. She supposed that Betty must have knocked it, or a breeze from the passage dislodged it, so, with shrinking fingers, she picked it up and put it back in place. An hour later she noticed that the cloth had fallen again. By now Betty was with her, having come down from her duties upstairs: she picked up the cloth and returned it to the mouthpiece—taking care, she told me earnestly, to tuck it tightly into the crack between the wooden mount and the wall. Again the cloth came free, and this time Mrs Bazeley actually caught a glimpse of it falling. She saw it from the corner of her eye as she stood at the kitchen table: she said it didn’t flutter, as if caught by a breeze; instead it slid straight down to the floor as if someone had tugged it.

  By now she was tired of her own fear, and the sight exasperated her. She caught the cloth up and flung it aside, then stood squarely before the stopped-up tube and shook her fist at it.

  ‘Go on,’ she cried, ‘you hateful old thing! No one’s minding you! Do you hear me?’ She put a hand on Betty’s shoulder. ‘Don’t look at him, Betty. Come away. If he wants to go on pranking, let him try. I’m sick to death of him.’ And she turned on her heel and headed back to the table.

  She had taken only two or three steps when she heard the sound of something softly striking the kitchen floor. She turned back to see that the cork, which a week before she had watched me screw snugly into the ivory mouthpiece, had been plucked or pushed from its socket and was rolling around at her feet.

  At that, all her bravado left her. She gave a scream, and darted to Betty—who had also heard the cork fall, though she hadn’t seen it rolling—and the two of them ran from the room, banging the door closed behind them. They stood for a moment in the vaulted basement passage, almost frightened out of their wits; then, hearing movement on the floor above, they stumbled together up the stairs. They were hoping for Caroline, and I wish now that they had found her; I think she would have been able to calm them down and keep the matter in check. But Caroline, unfortunately, was down at the building-work with Babb. It was Mrs Ayres they met, just coming out of the little parlour. She had been sitting quietly reading, and, taken by surprise by them now, she imagined from the wildness of their manner that some new catastrophe had taken place—another fire broken out, perhaps. She knew nothing of the whistling speaking-tube, and when she finally pieced together their confused account of the falling tea-towel and the tumbling cork, she was nonplussed.

  ‘But, what has frightened you so much?’ she asked them.

  They couldn’t properly say. All she could understand, finally, was how shaken they both were. The thing didn’t strike her as very serious, but she agreed to go and take a look. It was rather a nuisance, she said; but then, the house was full of nuisances these days.

  They followed her down to the threshold of the kitchen, but further than that they would not go. When she went in they stayed at the door, clutching at the frame and watching in dismay as, bemused, she examined the lifeless cloth, the cork, and the tube; and when she delicately tucked back her loops of greying hair and lowered her head to the mouthpiece, they stretched out their arms and said, ‘Oh, madam, be careful! Oh, madam, do please take care!’

  Mrs Ayres hesitated just for a moment—struck, perhaps, as I had been a few days before, by the sincerity of fear in their voices. Then she carefully put her ear to the cup and listened. When she straightened up, her expression was almost apologetic.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite know what I ought to have heard. There seems to be nothing.’

  ‘There’s nothing there, now!’ said Mrs Bazeley. ‘But it’ll be back, madam. It’s in there, waiting!’

  ‘Waiting? But, what do you mean? You talk as though there’s a sort of genie! How could there be anything there? The tube runs right up to the nurseries—’

  And here, Mrs Bazeley told me later, Mrs Ayres stumbled, and her look changed. She said, more slowly, ‘Those rooms are shut up. They’ve been shut up since the soldiers left us.’

  Now Betty spoke, in a voice of horror. ‘Oh, madam, you don’t suppose—you don’t suppose summat’s got up there, and is up there now?’

  ‘Oh, my Lord!’ cried Mrs Bazeley. ‘The girl’s right. With them rooms all shut and dark like that, how do we know what’s been going on in them? Anything could’ve been going on! Oh, why don’t you call for Dr Faraday and make him go up and have a look? Or let Betty run and fetch Makins, or Mr Babb.’

  ‘Makins or Babb?’ said Mrs Ayres, coming back to herself. ‘No, I certainly shan’t. Miss Caroline will be home soon, and what she’ll make of this I can’t imagine. If you’ll just get on with your tasks—’

  ‘We can’t put our minds to house-work, madam, with that nasty thing a-watching us!’

  ‘Watching you? A minute ago it only had ears!’

  ‘Well, whatever he’ve got, he in’t normal. He in’t nice. Oh, at least let Miss Caroline go up and take a look, when she comes back. Miss Caroline won’t stand for no nonsense.’

  But just as Caroline herself, a week before, had tried to keep her mother from being drawn into this matter, so, now, it occurred to Mrs Ayres that she might very easily sort this out before her daughter’s return. Whether she had any other motive in mind, I don’t know. I think it likely that she did—that, having just glimpsed the first, faint thread of a particular idea, she felt almost compelled to pursue it. Anyway, much to Mrs Bazeley’s and Betty’s horror, she declared that she would put an end to the whole business by going upstairs and examining the empty rooms herself.

  So once again they followed her, this time up through the north passage to the hall; and just as they had stuck at the threshold of the kitchen so now, at the foot of the staircase, they hung fearfully back, clutching at the serpent-headed banister and watching her climb. She went briskly and almost silently in her indoor shoes, and once she had rounded the first landing all they could do was put back their heads and lean into the stairwell, to watch her go higher. They saw the flash of her stockinged legs between the graceful rising balusters, and the grip and slide of her ringed fingers on the mahogany rail. They saw her, high up on the second floor, pause and give a single glance back down at them; and then she moved off, over creaking boards. The creaks continued to sound after her footsteps faded, but at length even they died away. Mrs Bazeley overcame her fear enough to advance a little higher; further than the first landing, however, nothing would induce her to go. She kept hard at the banister, straining her ears: trying to pick out sounds in the Hundreds silence, ‘like trying to spy figures in a mist’.
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  Mrs Ayres, too, as she left the stairwell behind, was aware of the thickening silence. She was not afraid of it, she told me later, but something of Mrs Bazeley’s and Betty’s suspense must have infected her, even if ever so slightly, for though she had started up the staircase boldly enough, she now found herself moving more cautiously. This floor was laid out differently from the two floors below, with narrower corridors and noticeably lower ceilings. The dome of glass in the roof lit up the stairwell with a chill, milky light, but, as in the hall downstairs, this had the effect of filling the spaces to every side of it with shadows. The rooms Mrs Ayres had to pass on her journey to the nurseries were mostly box-rooms, or servants’ bedrooms, and had long lain empty. Their doors were shut to prevent draughts, and some had been made fast in their frames with rolls of paper or chips of wood. This meant that the corridor was gloomier than ever; and with the generator off, the electric light-switches were useless.

  So she moved on through the shadows until she reached the nursery passage, where she found the door to the day-nursery closed like all the others, with the key turned in its lock. It was as she put her hand to the key that she experienced the first touch of real apprehension, conscious again of the heavy Hundreds silence, and suddenly irrationally fearful of what she might find when the door was opened. She felt, almost too vividly, the stir of old emotions; she remembered coming here, quietly like this, to visit her children when they were small. She recalled odd scenes: Roderick running into her arms, clinging to her like a monkey, putting his wet mouth to her gown; Caroline polite, stand-offish, busy with paints, her hair falling forward into the colours … And then, as if from a different, distant era, she saw Susan, in a creaseless dress. She remembered her nurse, Nurse Palmer. Rather sharp, rather stern, always giving the impression that one’s visits were a trouble, as if one wanted to see one’s child more than was really proper or nice … Unlocking the door, Mrs Ayres half expected to hear her voice, half expected to find everything unchanged. Here’s mummy come up for you again, look, Susan. Why, mummy can’t keep away!

  But the room in which she found herself could not, after all, have been more anonymous, nor more dismal. It had, as I’ve said, been stripped of its nursery furniture and fittings years before, and it now had the plangent echoing quality of all bare, neglected rooms. Its floorboards were dusty, and the faded paper on its walls was stained with damp. A set of black-out curtains, streaked indigo by the sun, still hung from a wire at the barred sash windows. The old-fashioned hob hearth was swept, but the brass fender was spotted with smuts where rainwater had found its way down the chimney; a corner of the mantelpiece was broken, and showed pale as the exposed enamel on a freshly chipped tooth. But there on the chimney-breast, just as Mrs Ayres remembered, was the speaking-tube: it finished on this floor in a short length of braided pipe, with another tarnished mouthpiece at its end. She went across to it, lifted it, and took out its whistle, and it at once gave off a musty, unpleasant odour—something like bad breath, she said, so that, as she put the cup to her ear, she was uncomfortably aware of all the lips which, over the years, must have pressed and slid against it … As before, she heard nothing save the muffled roar of her own blood. She listened for almost a minute, trying the mouthpiece at different angles against her ear. Then she fitted the whistle back in its socket, let the tube fall, and wiped her hands.

  She was disappointed, she realised—quite horribly disappointed. Nothing about the room seemed to want or welcome her: she gazed around, trying to find a trace of the nursery life that had gone on in it, but there was no sign of the sentimental pictures that had used to hang on the walls, or anything like that. There were only grubby echoes of the soldiers’ occupation, rings and scratches and cigarette-burns, scuffs on the skirting-boards; and the window-sills, as she found when she crossed to one of them, were ugly with little grey circles of gum. It was bitterly cold there, before the ill-fitting window sashes, but she stood for a moment, gazing at the view across the park, mildly intrigued by the high, oblique perspective it gave her on the far-off building-work, and able, presently, to pick out the figure of Caroline, who was just beginning her journey back to the house. The sight of her tall, eccentric-looking daughter making her solitary way across the fields made Mrs Ayres feel bleaker than ever, and after a moment of watching she stepped back from the glass. To her left was another door, communicating with the neighbouring room, the old night-nursery. That was the room in which her first daughter had lain sick with diphtheria; the place, in fact, where she had died. The door was ajar. Mrs Ayres found she couldn’t resist the dark temptation to open it properly and go inside.

  But again, there was little here that she remembered, nothing but wear and waste and neglect. A couple of panes in the windows were cracked, the sash frame crumbling around them. A corner hand-basin gave off a sour, uriney smell, and the boards beneath were almost rotting where a leaking tap had dripped. She went across to examine the damage; leaning, she put a hand to the wall. The wallpaper had a raised pattern of loops and arabesques that had once, she recalled suddenly, been very colourful. It had been painted over with a drab distemper, which the damp was turning to a sort of curd. She looked at the stains on her fingers with a feeling of distaste, then stood and worked her hands together, trying to brush the distemper from her skin. She was sorry, now, that she’d come in here—sorry that she’d come up to these rooms at all. She went to the basin and ran some frigid, spluttering water over her hands. She wiped her fingers against her skirt, and turned to leave.

  And as she did that, she felt the starting up of a breeze—or, anyway, something like a breeze, a cold movement of air, which came suddenly against her, striking her cheek, disarranging her hair, making her shiver; and a second later she was shocked and jolted almost out of her skin by a violent slamming in the neighbouring room. She guessed pretty much at once what had happened—that the door she’d unlocked and left open had been swung to by a draught from the badly fitting windows. But still, the sound was so unexpected, and so sickeningly loud in the stripped, silent room, it took her a moment to recover herself and steady her lurching heart. Trembling slightly, she went back through to the day-nursery and, as she’d expected, its door was closed. She crossed to it, and caught hold of its handle; and couldn’t open it.

  She stood still for a second, perplexed. She turned the handle to left and to right, supposing in dismay that the spindle must have broken, thinking that the violence with which the door had blown shut must have jolted the mechanism. But the lock was the old rim kind, fitted to the door and painted over: there was a slight gap between it and its keep, as there usually is, and when she stooped and put her eye to this she could see very clearly that the spindle was working as it should—and that the bolt of the lock had been shot home, just as if the key on the other side had been deliberately turned. Could a breeze have done that? Could a slamming door have locked itself? Surely not. She grew a little uneasy. She went back through to the night-nursery, to try the door there. That was locked, too—but then, there was no reason to expect to find it otherwise. It was locked fast, like all the others on this floor, against the cold.

  So she returned to the first door, to try it again—struggling, now, to hold on to her patience and her nerve; reasoning with herself that the wretched thing could not be locked, that it must simply be warped, as lots of Hundreds doors were warped, and sticking in its frame. But the door had moved easily enough when she had first opened it, and when she peered again into the gap between the lock and the keep, she again saw the shot bolt, unmistakable even in the gloom. Putting her eye to the keyhole, she could even make out the rounded end of the shaft of the turned key. She tried to see if there were some way she might get at that—perhaps with a hairpin?—and work it back. She still supposed that the door had managed, in some extraordinary way, to lock itself.

  Then she heard something. Quite distinct through the silence it rose: the swift, soft patter of footsteps. And in the inch of murky, milky light
that showed at the keyhole, she saw a movement. It came, she said, like a flash of darkness, as of someone or something passing very rapidly along the corridor, from left to right—in other words, as if heading along the nursery passage from the back stairs at the north-west corner of the house. Since she supposed, reasonably enough, that the person could only be Mrs Bazeley or Betty, her first response was one of relief. She got to her feet, and tapped on the door. ‘Who’s there?’ she called. ‘Mrs Bazeley? Betty? Betty, is it you? Whoever you are, you’ve locked me in, or someone has!’ She rattled the handle. ‘Hi! Do you hear me?’

  Bafflingly, no one answered, no one came; and the footsteps faded. Mrs Ayres lowered herself back down before the keyhole and again looked out, until at last—and again, to her considerable relief—the pattering returned and drew nearer. ‘Betty!’ she called—for she realised now that the footsteps, so rapid and soft, could hardly belong to Mrs Bazeley. ‘Betty! Let me out, child! Can’t you hear me? Can’t you see the key? Come and turn it, can’t you?’ But, much to her bewilderment, there came only another flash of darkness—moving from right to left, this time—and, instead of pausing at the door, the footsteps went on. ‘Betty!’ she called again, more shrilly. A moment of silence; then the footsteps returned. And after that the quick dark figure passed and re-passed the door, again and again: she could see the blur of it as it ran; it moved like a shadow, without face or feature. All she could think, with growing horror, was that the figure must be Betty’s after all, but that the girl had somehow lost her wits and was racing up and down the nursery passage like a lunatic.

  But then, the next time it came, the pattering figure seemed to draw closer to the door, seemed to brush against it with an elbow or a hand; and the times after that, the pattering footsteps were accompanied by a light sort of grating sound … Mrs Ayres understood suddenly that, as it ran, the figure was catching at the panels of wood with its fingernails. She had a distinct impression of a small, sharp-fingered hand—a child’s hand, she realised it was; and the thought was such a startling one, she scrambled back from the door in sudden panic, tearing her stockings at the knee. She got to her feet in the centre of the room, chilled and shaking.