SLEEP NO MORE

by L. T. C. Rolt

  You may perhaps have heard of the World’s End, for it’s quite well known, and all the guide-books mention it. It’s a little isolated inn standing four square to the winds on Trevean Head above a little fishing cove of the same name. As you may imagine, it’s associated with various tales of smuggling in ‘the good old days’. It’s a grand place to call for a glass of beer on a fine day, but it did not look particularly cheerful or hospitable to me when I eventually saw it loom up out of the darkness and the mist. Admittedly I was feeling pretty miserable, for I was very cold and my clothes were soaked by the mist and the spindrift which the wind was whipping off the sea.

  There was only one room available in the house, a room with two beds in it, one of which was already occupied, but I must say they did their best for me. There was a roaring fire in the little parlour, and they produced a good hot meal and strong tea liberally laced with rum. My room-mate excited my curiosity; he wasn’t the type I would ever have expected to find in such a place—not at this season, anyway. He was a shy, little, self-effacing, nondescript fellow; obviously, from his speech and appearance, a townsman, and possibly a clerk. I put his age at sixty or over, for his face was wizened and shrunken and his head quite bald. He gave me the impression that his nerves were not all they might have been because his weak eyes were very restless behind his thick-lensed glasses, while he seemed as if he could not keep still, but must be for ever standing up and sitting down, shuffling his feet or making vague fluttering movements with his hands.

  The night didn’t begin well, for it was a long time before I could get off to sleep. The wind, which had risen almost to gale force, filled the room with draughts, and rattled the ill-fitting door and window. At intervals of a minute or two, the whistling buoy off Trevean Head wailed like a lost soul, while every now and again I could hear a booming noise like the distant sound of heavy gunfire, caused, I imagine, by the heavy sea running into some cavern under the cliffs. And as if this chorus was not sufficient disturbance, my companion kept tossing and fidgeting about in his bed in the most exasperating way. At last, however, I managed to doze off, for I was dead-tired.

  I awoke from a curious dream to find that my room-mate had lit the candle which stood on the table between our beds and was pacing up and down the room in his pyjamas. This was the last straw.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ I called out.

  At the sound of my voice he started visibly, paused irresolutely for a moment or two, and then came and sat down on the foot of my bed. I could feel that he was trembling, and the expression of misery in his weak, blue eyes (he had taken his glasses off) was piteous. I couldn’t be angry with the wretched little man, so I asked him again, gently this time, what was the matter. He found his voice then, and proceeded to tell me his story. It may not sound much as I tell it to you now, but try to imagine it spoken in a flat, hopeless monotone in that cold, candle-lit room full of the sound of the sea and the hooting of that infernal buoy. Desolate was too good a word for it. I felt as if I really was at the world’s end. I can hear his voice now.

  ‘It’s thirty years since I last came here, and spent the night in this room,’ he began. ‘But I knew I should come back one day, sooner or later. I was on a walking holiday then, the same as you are, and they gave me the selfsame bed here that you’re in now. I went off to sleep soon enough and then—well, whether I really woke as I thought I did or whether I dreamt it all, I’ve never rightly been able to tell. Anyway, all of a sudden I found there was a candle burning in the room, on that table there where it is now, and that there was a little old man with a bald head pacing up and down, up and down in front of my bed. I was startled; not just because they hadn’t told me there was going to be someone else in my room, but because in some queer sort of way I felt I recognised the old chap, though for the life of me I couldn’t place him—not at first, that is. He seemed terribly upset and troubled in his mind about something, and though I don’t actually recollect that he spoke to me, yet somehow I knew that he was in pain, that he’d got some awful trouble—incurable—if you know what I mean. And, then—oh, it was horrible, and I couldn’t do anything but lie there and watch—he goes over to the table there, takes a revolver out of the drawer and shoots himself through the head. Then everything went dark again.’

  By the time he had finished this story he had grown quite hysterical, and I tried to console him, telling him it was only a dream and that it was all a long time ago anyway. But he kept shaking all over and rocking to and fro muttering ‘Horrible, horrible’, with his head buried in his hands. Then all of a sudden he got up off the bed, crossed over to the dressing-table which stood under the window, and began grimacing at his reflection in the mirror in the most ghastly sort of way. Finally, he turned round and faced me, his face so contorted that it looked scarcely human.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he screamed at me. ‘Don’t you see? It was me that I saw, me as you see me now.’

  It was then that I realised that he had a revolver in his hand. He must have taken it out of the little drawer under the mirror. The whole thing had become sheer nightmare, for although I knew quite well what was going to happen next, I just lay there quite powerless and could do nothing to stop him.

  Yes, he shot himself right enough. Nor was he under any illusion either, because in the dream I had before this happened, I had seen a man whom I thought I recognised: a man who was blinded and terribly scarred. And that was twenty years before I met with my accident in the blitz of ’41.

  Hear Not My Steps

  IT WAS A LARGE, gloomy room, and cold. Davies leant from his chair by the hearth and stirred the logs into a blaze. But neither the fire’s light, nor that of the candles which flickered and guttered in the draughts from ill-fitting doors and casements, could dispel the shadows from the corners of the panelled walls or from the great four-poster bed with its faded hangings. He got up, and for the fourth time made a thorough examination of the room. He found nothing unusual. The seals he had placed over doors and windows were intact, and no movable objects had been disturbed from the chalk rings he had drawn round them. His thermograph recorded a slight fall in temperature, but no more than might be expected at the approach of midnight. He returned to his chair, yawned and picked up the book he had been reading. This business of Psychical Research upon which he had embarked so enthusiastically was beginning to pall. In the past two years he had kept similar vigil in four alleged ‘haunted rooms’ in different parts of the country, from none of which, according to local superstition, he had any right to emerge alive. But no incident which, by any stretch of imagination, could be attributed to supernatural agency had rewarded his patience, discomfort and loss of sleep. It looked as though this, his fifth experiment, was going to prove equally fruitless.

  No longer expectant, his eyelids drooped, and he must have dozed, for when he opened his eyes once more and glanced at his wrist-watch, the hands pointed to half-past midnight. He shivered involuntarily, and as he did so he became aware that although the fire still burned brightly, the room had grown very cold. A glance at his thermograph confirmed this sensation, for it had recorded a fall of nearly fifteen degrees since his last examination little more than half an hour before. This was quite abnormal and quickened his flagging interest. He was about to make yet another tour of inspection when his attention was drawn to the shadows beside the bed. They appeared to be moving and thickening in a manner which the flickering of the candles did not explain. As he watched, a pale oval gradually distinguished itself from the gloom, about six feet from the floor. He soon realised that this was a face, and that he was witnessing the materialisation of a phantom. At first, the form was very indistinct, but though he heard no sound, it presently began to move, or rather to glide, very slowly away from the bed and towards his chair. As it did so it became clearer, like an image brought into the focus of a glass. He saw that it was the figure of a man clad in a cloak of some drab-coloured stuff which reached almost to his heels. The face was death
ly pale, and the dark eyes, opened very wide, stared directly, not so much at him as through him. Davies was not a timid man, and the emotion he felt was one of pity and concern rather than fear. Though it seemed a strange term to apply to a ghost, he thought it was the most haunted face he had ever seen. Terror and misery lurked in the eyes, but otherwise the features were expressionless, a mere mask which the mind within, petrified by some intensity of emotion, could not, and would never again, animate. This impression only lasted a few moments because the figure continued to advance, and as it did so it seemed to lose focus again, becoming once more immaterial and shadowy, until, though Davies thought it might be an illusion of the unsteady light, its shadow seemed to envelop him and to darken the outlines of the room. He glanced quickly behind him, but saw nothing; only his vision still seemed curiously blurred, and try as he would he could see nothing clearly. Even the candle-flames looked indistinct, surrounded by a wavering nimbus of light as though his eyes were veiled by tears.

  While he was aware that he had been vouchsafed an experience which most Psychical investigators would envy him, the knowledge somehow failed to arouse in him any enthusiasm. This was due, perhaps, to the defect of vision which troubled him. Gradually, however, he found that his sight was clearing until he could once more see the room quite plainly. Yet still he felt no reassurance; no return of critical interest. Instead, a great weight of undefinable depression seemed suddenly to have descended upon his spirit. Why, he thought, should we mortals struggle to discover what lies beyond the grave when death will come to lift the veil for all of us so soon? What, after all, is the purpose of life, the point of human hopes and fears, ambitions, passions and sorrows? Life is merely a series of distractions which blind us to the one great reality, the reality of death’s relentless and unconquerable quest. ‘Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’ Yes, and worms have long since writhed through that flesh which was once so fair. Since this is my inescapable destiny also, why strive against it, why reject the cool steel of Hamlet’s bare bodkin only to suffer the slow corruption of old age?

  What could have set him musing in a strain so foreign to his usually cheerful disposition? he put the sombre thoughts from him, struggling to assure himself of a friendly reality like one who wakens from a nightmare. But he found that the task called for an immense effort of will-power. He forced himself to his feet and began, like a man moving in a trance, to examine the room. He could find no trace of any of his seals, and the thermograph had vanished. Yet he could not bring himself to feel any surprise at their disappearance. He had no anticipation of finding them, for they had become the figments of a dream which was rapidly fading from his mind. The room, too, looked subtly different, although here again he could not believe with any conviction that it had ever looked otherwise. The oak of furniture and panelling looked lighter in colour, so did the elm-boarded floor which had lost the wave-like undulations of age. When he looked at the bright hues of the bed-hangings he wondered how he could ever have imagined that they were so old and faded. Somehow, the sight of the bed filled him with an indescribable feeling of loathing and revulsion, so that he moved away hurriedly towards the window and looked out. In his dream (for a dream he was now convinced it was) he had gazed down upon a square of waste land bordered by a row of tall poplars, but now a full moon showed him clearly that there were no poplars, and that the waste land was, in fact, a garden of clipped yews and terraced walks. Had he ever regarded such a prospect with equanimity? Every yew must surely harbour in its grotesque shadow some hostile and malevolent shape, nor was there any solace to be found in the stillness of the night, in the pallid moonlight, or even in the great star-pricked dome of the sky. ‘Thou sure and firm-set earth, hear not my steps’; the words of Macbeth echoed in his mind as he experienced a strange feeling of detachment. It was as though the dark globe were spinning beneath his feet, about to cast him out into the desolation of outer space. He gazed up at the sky. What if death were not, after all, an ultimate oblivion, but the prelude to an eternal suspense, lifeless yet deathless, in the cold and the dark of illimitable nothingness? His soul shrank from so desolate a conception, and, trembling, he moved back once more into the room. It looked bright in the light of the many tall candles which smoked in their sconces. He understood quite well now that horror lay concealed behind the hangings of the bed, yet an irresistible compulsion drew him there, and before he parted the curtains he knew what he would see.

  The woman’s hair, fanning out over the pillow’s whiteness, gleamed gold in the candlelight. She had been so beautiful, he remembered, whose only glory now lay in this hair. How quickly that beauty had been snuffed out! Where the roses and lilies so lately bloomed, now black corruption already crept. Who would beg a glance from eyes which had started from their sockets to stare so hideously? or a kiss from lips drawn back to reveal the sharp teeth which had bitten through the protuberant tongue?

  On the coverlet lay a length of whipcord. He picked it up, running its taut length between his fingers. Then, very deliberately, he coiled it about his throat and drew it tight. As he did so he realised what he was doing, but his hands continued to strain upon the cord until the sound of choking ceased and it was very still in the room.

  Agony of Flame

  ‘I KNOW OF AN ISLAND on a lake in Ireland that would make a more appropriate target for an atomic bomb than Bikini Atoll.’

  This unexpected and astonishing statement, and the way in which it was spoken, brought our somewhat inconclusive discussion on the subject of the atomic bomb tests to an abrupt close. It was followed by a few moments of uncomfortable silence during which we eyed the speaker with mingled feelings of embarrassment and curiosity. About forty-five years of age, with hair prematurely white, a sensitive face and the hands of an artist, he was not, judging by appearances and by his previous conversation, the sort of man to advocate the discharge of an atomic bomb anywhere, least of all upon an Irish island. Obviously he read our bewilderment in our faces.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, ‘I agree with you all right. I, too, think the bomb should never have been invented, and that it certainly should never have been used. But, on the other hand, I can assure you that if there is one place on earth which should be utterly obliterated it is this island. No, I’m not going to tell you where it is; some of you might be inquisitive, and such curiosity, if acted upon, would be dangerous, in fact it might be deadly dangerous. Ten years ago I spent a night on the island. Since then I have quite forgotten what it is like to sleep dreamlessly.’ He laughed, but without mirth. ‘But I was lucky; my companion was by no means so fortunate. You want to hear about it? All right, but I shall be surprised if you’ll believe it however earnestly I swear that it is true.

  ‘I came to the lake in which the island lies by water. My friend—I’ll just call him Jack—and I were cruising round the Irish coast in the thirty-five footer which I had at that time, and, using our auxiliary engine, we found our way up the canalised river which connects the lake with an arm of the sea. There are a great number of these fiord-like inlets in Ireland, particularly along the west coast, so this won’t give you much of a clue to our whereabouts.

  ‘It had been what the Irish call a “soft” day, I remember. There was no real weight of rain, but the clouds never cleared the mountains. Sometimes they lifted until they only cut off the high summits, but at times they crept down to water-level and enveloped us in a mist that was deceptively wetting. Though the sky remained overcast the light had that unique silvery, luminous quality which you only find in the west. By the time we reached the lake it was nearly dark. Whistler might have called the scene “Nocturne in Black and Silver”, though there was so little colour that it was subject for wood engraver or etcher rather than painter. There was not a breath of wind to flaw the surface of the lake. It reflected so perfectly the last pale light of a sky uncoloured by any sunset that the black shapes of numerous small, wooded islets seemed to float in air, unsubstantial as Prospero’s pageant. Once, an arrow
-head of wild geese flew honking overhead, and occasionally there floated over the water a raucous sound which I attributed to a heronry on one of the islands. Otherwise, only the steady throb of our little Kelvin engine broke the stillness.

  ‘We Saxons don’t understand the Irish, you know, and I don’t suppose we ever shall. We label their mysticism “Celtic Twilight” and dismiss it jokingly as a sort of childish whimsy. But if you were to find yourself alone in the west of Ireland in circumstances such as I’m describing, maybe the joke would begin to lose its point. Brought up in a more bracing climate we don’t give ourselves time to stop and think, but burn out our lives in an elaborate world of our own artifice. But out there, in the loneliness and the soft, relaxing, misty air, self-importance quickly dissolves, life seems ephemeral, and you begin to understand the Celt a little better; his sense of the past; his lack of ambition which we call shiftlessness; the melancholy that never leaves him even in his joy.

  ‘But I’m wandering from the point. I wanted to convey to you the atmosphere of the place, but unless you have been to the far west yourselves, I think it’s beyond my power to do so. Suffice it to say that if someone had assured us that those squawking herons were really Firbolgs or that the geese were the Host of the Sidhe, I am sure we should have believed them. You may therefore suppose that what I am going to tell you is merely the product of a too vivid imagination. In answer, I can only assure you that what follows has nothing whatever to do with Irish mythology, and that it would take more than a Firbolg to turn my hair white overnight.