The Little Stranger

by Sarah Waters

  At that, at their loudest point, the footsteps abruptly ceased. She knew now that the figure must be standing on the other side of the door; she even saw the door move a little in its frame, as if just nudged or pressed or tested. She looked at the lock, expecting to hear the turning of the key and see the twisting of the handle, and nerving herself for what would be revealed when the door was opened. But after a long moment of suspense the door relaxed back on its hinges. She held her breath, until all she could hear, as if on the surface of the silence, was the rapid thumping of her own heartbeats.

  Then, from over her shoulder, there came a sudden piercing blast from the whistle of the speaking-tube.

  So completely had she been bracing herself for some quite different shock that she started away from the ivory mouthpiece, crying out and almost stumbling. The tube fell silent, then whistled again; the whistle, after that, came regularly, a series of shrill, prolonged blasts. It was impossible, she said, to suppose that the sound might be the product of a breeze or a freak of acoustics: the whistle was purposeful, demanding—something like the wail of a siren, or the cry of a hungry baby. It was so deliberate a signal, in fact, that the thought at last broke through her panic that there might, after all, be a simple enough explanation; for wasn’t it possible that Mrs Bazeley, anxious for her safety but still unwilling to follow her upstairs, had returned to the kitchen and was trying to communicate with her? The tube, anyway, was at least a part of the ordinary human Hundreds world—nothing like that inexplicable pattering figure out in the passage. So, again screwing up her courage, Mrs Ayres went to the chimney-breast and picked the shrieking thing up. With clumsy, shaking fingers she drew the ivory whistle from it—and was plunged back, of course, into silence.

  But the thing in her hand was not quite silent, after all. As she raised the cup to her ear she could hear, coming from it, a faint, moist susurration—as if wet silk, or something fine like that, were being slowly and haltingly drawn through the tube. The sound, she realised with a shock, was that of a laboured breath, which kept catching and bubbling as if in a narrow, constricted throat. In an instant she was transported back, twenty-eight years, to her first child’s sickbed. She whispered her daughter’s name—‘Susan?’—and the breathing quickened and grew more liquid. A voice began to emerge from the bubbling mess of sound: a child’s voice, she took it to be, high and pitiful, attempting, as if with tremendous effort, to form words.

  And Mrs Ayres let the speaking-tube drop, in absolute horror. She ran to the door. She didn’t care what might be on the other side of it now: she hammered on the panels, calling wildly for Mrs Bazeley, and when no answer came she darted unsteadily back across the room to one of the barred nursery windows, and plucked at its catch. She had, by this time, begun to weep tears of fright, which almost blinded her. They, and her panic, must have stripped her of sense and strength, for the catch was a simple one, and quite loose, but somehow it cut into her fingers and would not give.

  But there, below her, was Caroline, just making her brisk way up from the lawn to the south-west corner of the terrace; and at the sight of her, Mrs Ayres abandoned the catch and starting banging on the window. She saw her daughter pause and raise her head, looking about, hearing the sound but unable to place it; a second later, to Mrs Ayres’s unutterable relief, she saw her lift up her hand in a gesture of recognition. But then she made out more clearly the direction of Caroline’s gaze. She realised that she was looking, not up at the nursery window, but straight ahead, across the terrace. Pressing closer to the glass, she caught sight of a stoutish female figure running across the gravel, and recognised Mrs Bazeley. She saw her meet Caroline at the top of the terrace steps, and begin making quick, frightened gestures back to the Hall. They were joined, after a moment, by Betty, who also ran across the terrace, beckoning them agitatedly on … All this time, the unstoppered mouthpiece had been sending out its pitiful whisper. Now, seeing the three women below, Mrs Ayres realised that she and the feeble, clamourous presence at the other end of the tube were alone together in that vast house.

  This was the moment when her panic tipped over into hysteria. She raised her fists and pummelled on the window—and two of the fine old panes gave way beneath her hands. Caroline, Mrs Bazeley, and Betty, hearing the sound of the breaking glass, looked up in amazement. They saw Mrs Ayres shrieking from between the nursery bars—shrieking like a child, Mrs Bazeley said—and beating her hands against the edges of broken window.

  What happened to her in the time it took the women to make their stumbling, frightened way up to the nursery, no one could afterwards say. They found the door to the room ajar and the speaking-tube silent, the ivory whistle fixed neatly in its socket. Mrs Ayres had worked herself rigidly into a corner and, effectively, ‘blacked out’. She was bleeding badly from the cuts on her hands and arms, so the three of them did what they could to bind up her wounds, tearing up one of her own silk scarves for bandages. They got her to her feet and half walked, half carried her downstairs to her bedroom, where they gave her brandy and tried to warm her, building up the fire in the grate and loading her with blanket after blanket—for now, in her shock, she’d begun to shake.

  She was still shaking when I saw her, just over an hour later.

  I had been visiting a patient—luckily, a private patient with a telephone, so when Caroline put through a call to my surgery, the girl at the exchange was able to pass on her urgent request that I stop off at Hundreds on my way home. I drove to the Hall as soon as I could, with no idea of what was awaiting me. I was utterly flabbergasted to find the house in such a state. A white-faced Betty took me up to Mrs Ayres: she was sitting with Caroline at her side, hunched and shivering, starting like a hare at every slight unexpected movement or sound; and at the first sight of her, I faltered. Her expression was so wild, she looked just like her son, just like Roderick in the last, worst phase of his delusions. Her hair was straggling around her shoulders, and her arms and hands were ghastly. The blood had caught in her bulky rings, turning all the stones to rubies.

  But her wounds, by a miracle, turned out to be fairly superficial. I cleaned them up, and dressed and bound them, and then, taking Caroline’s place, I simply sat and gently held her hands. Bit by bit, the worst of the wildness faded from her gaze and she told me what had happened to her—shuddering and weeping with every fresh twist of it, and covering her face.

  But at last she looked squarely and urgently into my eyes.

  ‘You understand what’s happened?’ she said. ‘You see what this means? I failed her, Doctor! She came, and I failed her!’

  She clutched my fingers—clutched them so hard, I saw the blood rising to the surface of her dressings as her wounds reopened.

  ‘Mrs Ayres,’ I said, trying to steady her.

  She wouldn’t listen. ‘My darling girl. I’ve wanted her to come, you see, so desperately. I’ve felt her, here in this house. I’ve lain in my bed, and felt her near. So near, she was! But I was greedy. I wanted her nearer. I drew her, by wishing for her to come. And then she came—and I was afraid. I was afraid of her, and failed her! And now I don’t know what frightens me more, the thought that she’ll never come to me again, or the thought that, in failing her, I’ve made her hate me. Will she hate me, Doctor? Say she won’t!’

  I said, ‘Nobody hates you. You must be calm.’

  ‘But I’ve failed her! I’ve failed her!’

  ‘You’ve failed no one. Your daughter loves you.’

  She looked into my face. ‘You think she does?’

  ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘You promise me?’

  ‘I promise you,’ I said.

  I would have said anything, at that moment, simply to calm her down; and soon I forbade her to speak any more, and I gave her a sedative and put her to bed. She lay fretful for a time, with her bandaged hands still clasped in mine, but the sedative was a strong one, and once she was sleeping I gently disengaged my fingers from hers and went downstairs, to go over
the incident with Caroline, Mrs Bazeley, and Betty. They were gathered together in the little parlour, looking as pale and as shaken almost as Mrs Ayres herself. Caroline had handed out glasses of brandy, and the alcohol, on top of the shock, had made Mrs Bazeley tearful. I questioned her and Betty as closely as I could, but all they could confirm of Mrs Ayres’s story was that she had gone up to the second floor alone; that she had stayed there so long—they thought, about fifteen or twenty minutes—they had grown anxious about her, and had gone out to alert Caroline; and then, that all three of them had seen her crying out in that dreadful way at the broken window.

  When I had pieced together their side of things I went up to the day-nursery to examine the scene for myself. I had never been up to the second floor before, and I made the ascent warily, pretty shaken by the mood of the house. I found the bare room looking hideous, with its broken window and its streaks and splashes of darkening blood. But its door moved smoothly on its hinges, and the key moved glibly, too, in the lock. I tried turning the key with the door both closed and open; I even gave the door a slam, to see if that might jar the mechanism—it had no effect at all. I listened again at that wretched speaking-tube and, as before, heard nothing. So then I went through to the old night-nursery, just as Mrs Ayres had, and I stood very still and expectant—thinking of the dead child, Susan; thinking of my mother; thinking a thousand gloomy things—holding my breath, almost daring something to happen, someone or something to come. But nothing did happen. The house seemed deathly silent and chill, the room felt bleak, unhappy—but quite lifeless.

  I did consider one explanation: that somebody had staged the whole affair with the intention of tormenting Mrs Ayres, either as a sort of ghastly joke, or out of simple malice. I could hardly suspect Caroline; and since I wouldn’t believe it of Mrs Bazeley, who’d been a servant at the house since before the war, my suspicions had to fall on Betty. It was possible that she, after all, had somehow been behind the business with the speaking-tube in the first place; and Mrs Ayres herself had said that the footsteps she had heard, going back and forth beyond the door, were light ones—light as a child’s. According to Mrs Bazeley, Betty had been down in the hall with her throughout the entire incident, though she also admitted that, in her anxiety for Mrs Ayres, she had gone further up the staircase while Betty had hung back. Could the girl have run to the servants’ stairs, made her rapid way up them, locked the nursery door, and then gone pattering back and forth in the passage—all without the other woman’s having missed her? It seemed very unlikely. I had come up by the back stairs myself, and had examined them pretty closely by the flame of my lighter. They were covered with a fine layer of dust, which my own shoes instantly disturbed, but there were no other footmarks, heavy or soft, I was quite certain. And then, Betty’s distress over the incident seemed very genuine; I knew she was fond of her mistress; and finally, of course, there was Mrs Ayres’s own word against her involvement, for she had seen the girl with Mrs Bazeley outside the house while the sounds in the speaking-tube went on …

  I ran through all this in my mind, looking over that bleak room; but soon the oppressions of the place proved too much for me. I wet my handkerchief at the basin and cleared up the worst of the blood. I found a few loose pieces of linoleum and did what I could to block up the broken panes of window. Then I went heavily back downstairs. I went down by the main staircase, and met Caroline on the first landing, just coming out of her mother’s room. She touched her finger to her lips, and we carried on silently together to the little parlour.

  When we were inside with the door closed, I said, ‘How is she?’

  She shivered. ‘She’s sleeping. I thought I heard her call out, that’s all. I don’t want her to wake up and be frightened.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘she should sleep for hours with the Veronal inside her. Come and sit by the fire. You’re cold. And God knows, so am I.’

  I led her to the hearth, drew the chairs close together before it, and we sat. I put my elbows on my knees, and my face in my hands. Beaten and weary, I rubbed my eyes.

  She said, ‘You’ve been upstairs.’

  I nodded, gazing blearily at her. ‘Oh, Caroline, that horrible room! It looks like a lunatic’s cell up there. I’ve locked the door of it. I think you should leave it locked, now. Don’t go up there.’

  She looked away from me, towards the fire. ‘Another room shut up,’ she said.

  I was still rubbing at my sore eyes. ‘Well, that’s the least of our worries right now. It’s your mother we need to think about. I just can’t believe this has happened, can you? And she was quite herself, this morning?’

  She said, without drawing her gaze from the flames, ‘She was no different from how she was yesterday, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘She’d slept well?’

  ‘As far as I know … I oughtn’t to have gone down to the houses, I suppose. I oughtn’t to have left her.’

  I lowered my hands. ‘Don’t be silly. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me! You’ve been telling me for weeks that she hasn’t been herself. I wish to God I’d paid more attention. I’m so sorry, Caroline. I had no idea her mind was as unsettled as this. If those cuts had been deeper, if she’d caught an artery—’

  She looked frightened. I reached for her hand. ‘Forgive me. This is dreadful for you. To see your mother in such a state … These—these fantasies of hers.’ I spoke reluctantly. ‘These ideas about your sister, that your sister’s been … visiting her. Did you know about that?’

  She gazed back at the fire again. ‘No. But it makes sense now. She’s been spending so much time alone. I thought it was tiredness. Instead, up in her room, she must have been thinking that, that Susan—Oh, it’s grotesque! It’s—it’s filthy.’ Her pale cheeks had coloured. ‘And it is my fault, no matter what you say. I knew that something like this would happen. That it was only a matter of time.’

  ‘Well,’ I said miserably, ‘then I should have known it, too. And I could have kept a closer eye on her.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how closely you watch,’ she said. ‘We watched Roderick, remember? I should have taken her away—right away, from Hundreds.’

  There was something odd about the way she said this; and as she spoke she looked at me, then almost furtively dropped her gaze. I said, ‘What do you mean? Caroline?’

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ she said. ‘It’s something in this house! Something that’s been here all along, and has just … woken up. Or something that’s come here, to punish and spite us. You saw how my mother was, when you arrived. You heard what happened to her. You heard Mrs Bazeley, and Betty.’

  I was gazing at her in disbelief. I said, ‘You can’t seriously mean—You can’t believe—Caroline, listen.’ I reached across her for her other hand, and held her fingers tightly in mine. I said, ‘You, your mother, Mrs Bazeley, Betty: you’re all of you at the end of your tethers! This house, yes, has put thoughts in your heads. But is that so surprising? One grim thing has led so clearly to another: first Gyp, then Roderick, and now this. Surely you can see that? You aren’t your mother, Caroline. You’re stronger than she is. Why, I remember her sitting, weeping, where you’re sitting now, months ago! She must have been fretting over the memory of your sister ever since those wretched scribbles appeared. She’s been unwell, not sleeping; her age is against her, too. And then that foolish business with the speaking-tube—’

  ‘And the locked door? The footsteps?’

  ‘The door was probably never even shut! It was open, wasn’t it, when you and Mrs Bazeley went up there? And the whistle was back in its place? As for the footsteps—I dare say she heard some sound. She thought she heard Gyp’s footsteps once, you remember? That must have been all it took, for her mind to begin to give way.’

  She shook her head, frustrated. ‘You have an answer for everything. ’

  ‘A rational answer, yes! You aren’t seriously suggesting that your sister—’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘N
o, I’m not suggesting that.’

  ‘What, then? That some other ghost entirely is haunting your mother? The same ghost, presumably, that made those marks in Roderick’s room—’

  ‘Well something made them, didn’t it?’ she cried, pulling her hands out of my grip. ‘Something’s here, I know it is. I think I’ve known it ever since Rod got ill, but I was too afraid to face it … I keep thinking, too, of what my mother said, when that last set of scribbles was found. She said the house knows all our weaknesses and is testing them, one by one. Roddie’s weakness was the house itself, you see. Mine—well, perhaps mine was Gyp. But Mother’s weakness is Susan. It’s as if, with the scribbles, the footsteps, the voice—it’s as if she’s being teased. As if something’s playing with her.’

  I said, ‘Caroline, you can’t possibly believe that.’

  ‘Oh,’ she answered angrily, ‘it’s all right for you! You can talk about delusions and fantasies, and things like that. But you don’t know this family; not really. You’ve only seen us like this. We were different, a year ago. I’m sure we were. Things have changed—gone wrong—so badly, so quickly. There has to be something, don’t you see?’

  Her face was white now, and stricken. I put my hand on her arm.

  ‘Look, you’re tired. You’re all of you tired.’

  ‘You keep on saying that!’

  ‘Well, unfortunately it keeps on being true!’