Seven Strange Stories

by Rebecca Lloyd

  Publication information

  by Rebecca Lloyd

  First published Tartarus Press, 2017 at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK

  'The Pantun Burden' was published by The British

  Fantasy Society Journal 13, 2012

  'Jack Werrett, the Flood Man' was first published by Dunhams

  Manor Press, 2016

  All stories copyright Rebecca Lloyd

  ISBN 978-1-905784-96-7

  Dedication:

  Mary Farquharson and Eduardo Llerenas

  in admiration of their work in bringing beautiful music

  to the world's attention over many years

  Contents

  The Monster Orgorp

  Jack Werrett, the Flood Man

  Christy

  The Pantun Burden

  Again

  Little Black Eyes and Tiny Hands

  Where’s the Harm?

  THE MONSTER ORGORP

  It seems to me now, that contrary to all I had imagined as a child, monsters are not only to be found in the slimy ocean depths, or in distant savage lands, or in the terrifying tales whispered at night by the old people in my village, but in point of fact they throng all about us in a multitude of guises. There are some who look sweet and pleasing yet commit monstrous acts, and others who look abominable and whose deeds complement their shrivelled souls and wretched bodies, and there are yet more - the miserable outcasts society has created through its own superstitious fear.

  ***

  When first I arrived at the Hogsmoor Estate, I was sixteen and not long out of Dorset where life was simple and people had little in the way of ambition or vanity. For a while I was employed in the scullery of the great house, with the extra duties of cleaning some of the higher servants’ rooms. But Lady Mallet came at me like a hawk one morning and carried me away to her chambers to work amongst her dresses, hoops, little silver shoes, her powders and rednesses, brushes and combs, stockings and odours—and all the roaming cockroaches and the terrible pale dust through which they trailed across the floor and over the chairs.

  ‘I understand from my housekeeper Grace Rivers, that you can read, Wilson,’ Lady Mallet said as I tried not to stare at the opulence and chaos of her bedchamber. ‘You told her as much on your interview—is it true?’

  ‘It is,’ I replied.

  ‘That you told her as much or that you really can?’

  ‘I really can.’

  ‘All words you might encounter, not just a few of the common ones?’

  ‘I can read anything, Lady Mallet.’

  ‘And that is why I want you up here,’ she replied, almost smiling at me, ‘as one of your duties will be to prepare my waters and concoctions each week down in the lower back kitchen for which purpose I will give you a book of instructions that you must follow exactly. If you flounder, ask Grace for help as she too can read, and has been preparing my potions since my last maid abandoned me. Do not look so mournful, it is better to work close by me than on the scullery floor, is it not? I can see how swollen and red your tiny hands are and I don’t suppose you came from Dorset with hands like that. What do you say; are you happy to come to me?’

  ‘Yes, Lady Mallet, very much so. I am most grateful,’ I said, making myself look at her thin whitened face.

  ‘And how are the others treating you? Well I hope. They are a cheerful band and not too rough, I think?’

  ‘They are very kind to me,’ I murmured, yet my words were hollow because although I had never been employed elsewhere and thus had no means to make fair judgement, I found the staff to be a nervous crowd, forever watchful and easily upset. The cook and her helpers, all except Rose Gifford and Susan Blagget, lived in their own house on the estate a short walk from the mansion, and I believe the generality of feeling was that it was good fortune they were not so much in our company as they were particularly quarrelsome and foul-mouthed.

  Also, I had discovered that many of the servants at Hogsmoor House had the same ambition; to leave the employ of Lord and Lady Mallet when they had sufficient money to enable them to do so without putting them or their families in the path of poverty. Yet, despite the wretchedness of the staff, I soon missed their company. Being above stairs or in the damp back kitchen, I scarce saw the other female servants I knew during the day—the sewing women, those who worked in the laundry, Adelaide the other scullery maid who was becoming a friend to me, and the three stillroom girls—little sprites who laughed so merrily about nothing visible to the rest of the world.

  Apart from that, and in truth, I was quickly terrified of Lady Mallet herself, and I would have cheerfully swapped my afternoons of mixing her vile tinctures or mending her garments for scrubbing the rough stone floor in the scullery once more. I was mortally afraid of her drooping eyes and her neck that resembled a white cliff. I was frightened by the smell of her body which was musty and meaty and putrid. I was frightened by her sharp red lips, I was frightened by the way she owned me, how she could command me, stroke me, hit me, do anything that came into her head on the merest impulse.

  She used me cruelly many times—should I falter or pinch her during dressing she would rail at me and bang me about. In the beginning, I often had her stomacher crooked in my nervousness, and she would reach over to take her stay busk and hit my head with it until my ears sang and my eyes watered. In Hogsmoor, because the house is remote from all civilisation, we did not have levées to which, so I have been told, all manner of people come to watch the toilette of a lady in her dressing room. I suspect also that because of the extravagance of Lord Mallet, the household could not afford to employ several maids for the dressing of one lady, and so all was down to me alone, and I battled with it mightily and began, like the others, to think of home.

  But then the Thing came amongst us in 1729, brought right inside the house by Lady Mallet herself, and after that, everything changed. The night it arrived, I was staring out of the window of my small room, which I had the good fortune, much to the resentment of some, not to have to share with another girl. The moon had turned a curious red colour. It was round and full and bloody, and in the courtyard below a chaise drew up and its approach was of a discreet nature; the horse merely walking, which made me look the harder. I saw Lady Mallet alight; I knew her by the ermine trim on her cloak. Then came another, huddled and hesitant with a hidden face who followed quickly as Lady Mallet led the way to the small door that enters Hogsmoor House on the northern side.

  Some weeks passed before I became aware that the visitor had not departed. I had in the first instance, assumed Lady Mallet entertained friends who would stay a day or two to keep her company, for I conjectured that it must have been pitiful indeed to be married to Lord Mallet, or ‘Hog’ as his English valet and other servants called him—in truth, as we all called him. I learnt many things of a revolting nature about the man, not the least of which was told me at my interview, and having heard these things, it was not necessary for anyone else to warn me to stay out of his way.

  ‘I was but making the point clear,’ Rose Gifford, the cleverer of the two kitchen girls said, leaning across the table and staring hard into my face one evening. ‘For a huge man, he approaches silently, almost as if he, like Lady Mallet, was a . . .’ she looked towards Mrs Rivers for permission to speak, but it was not granted, ‘. . . and therefore able to become invisible at will,’ she whispered so softly that I did not quite believe what I had heard.

  I looked down at my soup bowl and in the creases that were forming on the brown greasy surface, I thought I spied a monstrous face with sloping eyes and open mouth, and I chided myself for allowing Rose to trifle with my imagination in that manne
r.

  ‘I have almost half the money I need to quit Hogsmoor now,’ Patrick, the groom announced, and the way in which his statement did not appear to strike the others as incongruous revealed to me that I was standing at the edges of a conversation held many times before on this very subject and no doubt at this very table. I recall that it was one of those chill nights that had descended fast and sucked away the weak daylight instantly, throwing across the gardens and fields a shroud of silence which only magnified the ticking within the lower regions of the house of those little beetles that speak incessantly of death.

  ‘Yet, you can hear Hog coming these days because he wears those great flapping shoes that do not so much hurt his gout,’ Adelaide whispered. ‘If a magic spell could be found for the purpose of keeping him hobbled with the gout forever that would be of great benefit to the women here.’

  ‘And the men,’ Footman Martin said, ‘young ones like me and Patrick, at least.’

  ‘That is enough, Martin!’ Mrs Rivers said loudly, and I felt that on saying so, her glance at me was purposeful although I could not make anything of it.

  ‘Perhaps it really was Lady Mallet who cursed him with the gout,’ Gideon Ashfield remarked. ‘That is one of Hog’s jokes, at least,’ he added, ‘and I should know, being his valet. But the man is unable to help himself; his appetites are monstrous and debauched, and his vanity is limitless. He is a true buck fitch as we all know, but as uncouth as he is, I would say in his defence—even if you do not believe me—that he sometimes recognises the depravity of his life and the withering of his soul and falls to wild sobbing.’

  There was an interval of silence as the company reflected upon Gideon’s words, and I took the liberty of looking hard into the faces of each of my companions. None were pleasing to gaze upon at that moment.

  ‘You mean to say he blubbers?’ Patrick asked. ‘I do also when there is great misery in my mind.’

  ‘Yes, he blubbers if you like,’ Gideon said. ‘From time to time I can hear his sorrowful weeping, my room being close to his apartments.’

  ‘Poh! Sorrowful weeping indeed!’ Rose Gifford remarked, ‘I am mightily impressed, and so is my arse!’

  ‘Rose, you are extremely gross in your language! Desist, or you will eat in your room alone and in the dark,’ Mrs Rivers warned her.

  Had the staff not been so agitated and fearful, and less intent on bitter criticism of those whom they served, I might have raised the subject of the visitor in the house, for I was intensely curious about the matter. I wondered if I was the only one who had noticed the strange figure, and it caused such bewilderment in me that I had taken, in my mind, to referring to it as the ‘Thing’. Only two days previously I had encountered it at close range. I came around the crooked passageway up on the third storey in the early evening, and I saw it emerge from the darkness and seem to drift—so silent was it—to the balustrade to look over and down to the great hall below. Some air about it kept me halted in the shadows with my breath caught in my throat. It did not stay long, but slunk back whence it had come under one of the carved archways, leaving visible further along and staring straight at me with her face like a floating vizard in the gloom, and as white as limestone, Lady Mallet herself.

  She did not speak, but turned around and made her way back to her own chambers, but ever after that evening her cool treatment of me ceased, and was replaced by unctuous charm. She would find me from time to time in one of the narrow back corridors in the eastern wing of the house, and I would be obliged to stand and wait for her to come to me. She always approached too close and too warm—sticky almost the feeling of her hands on my shoulders and her breath smelling of nutmeg and blood and decay. While you would suppose I should be enchanted by the advances of one so much above me, instead I found her cloying friendliness more frightening than the lofty scorn that had preceeded it, and wished fervently I could put some distance between us.

  She often had dainty morsels for me to try. ‘I have brought this little wonder for you, Wilson,’ she would say, unwrapping a linen napkin. ‘It is new from the Cantrella islands. Open your mouth.’ I durst not disobey her, and she would feed me as if I was a baby bird, and watch me while I ate. And I did eat some very queer things because of her, some of which I enjoyed—sugared fruits and wet and dried sweetmeats—others of which were repugnant to me, dense and slimy or agonisingly bitter. As she hovered over me with her mouth agape, it was impossible not to look at her two front teeth, one was aslant and yellowish and the other had a black rimmed hole all the way through it, made perhaps by a tooth worm. It became a habit of mine to drop my gaze quickly when she caught me staring at the hole, yet the fault was hers in having told me in great detail and with affecting drama how she had grown tired of finding ingenious ways to disguise her teeth while in company, particularly should she visit London. She conveyed to me many times how she yearned to have fashioned for her a couple of good white teeth taken from the fresh corpse of a hanged man, as, she said, they were the strongest and most healthy to be found, and they were lucky. ‘Did you like that, Wilson?’ she’d ask on seeing me swallow whatever she had fed me.

  ‘It was most delicious,’ I always replied, ‘I thank you, Lady Mallet.’

  ‘They are just for my loyal servants, for loyalty and discretion should be rewarded.’ Her meaning was clear to me; I was to pretend I had never seen the Thing and should I find myself within sight of it, I was to withdraw into the shadows and turn fully around so that my back was towards it as it came along.

  It passed me many times over that year, and foh! There was a stench about it that often had me close to reeling, and after each occasion I found it hard to calm my quickened heart. I felt that it half-glanced at me as it crept past, even though my eyes were downcast and my face hung. I noted that it had no footfall, but glided in a manner that curled my spine bones in on themselves and made my stomach clench sharply. I knew which rooms it inhabited by noticing from whence Lady Mallet appeared—for she visited it from time to time carrying flagons and pots of food, and always came out of the chamber with a solemn air.

  It was clear that Lord Mallet was not aware of the creature that had taken up residence in his mansion, and that is perhaps not surprising, since he lived on the other side of the grand house and was preoccupied with his indulgences, which were many. Perhaps if he had stood facing the wall as the Thing passed by and had to suffer the stench of it, he would have curbed his foolish and drunken ways, except, of course, a nose as bloated and reddened as his would long have given up its natural function and become merely a fleshy, useless protuberance mounted on his huge face. Had he been aware of the Thing, perhaps he would not have shut himself up in his own apartments to gamble away his money with his friends or have invited them to dine with him quite so freely, quite so often, quite so loudly—and with quite so many women who could not have been anything other than whores, although at the time, in my innocence, as they drifted through the main doors of Hogsmoor House, I took them simply as loud and buffoonish in dress and manner and curious for that as they rustled their silks and shouted and stomped their way to Lord Mallet’s side of the house.

  I cannot say I ever saw the Thing unshrouded; it moved about in the upper regions of the house usually towards late afternoon and always within a long cloak, not red as you might expect, but dark-coloured and with a cowl so deep that it was not possible to glimpse details of the face, except for the occasional flash of scabrous white.

  Hunted by blundering Lord Mallet—as some of us were—and screeched at by Lady Mallet suddenly through the dark rooms of the house, the staff were constantly on their guard, and so it transpired that before too much time had passed, the subject of the visitor did arise amongst us.

  ‘Who is that who lives up there in those rooms by the arches?’ Rose Gifford asked one dinnertime in deep winter. ‘I think it is a woman for being slender, but I did not see the face, and I strongly have the notion that I would not like to see it neither, only I cannot tell yo
u why.’

  Mrs Rivers laid her hand down onto the table with a curious slowness and frowned. ‘However did you come to be above stairs, Rose Gifford; did Lord Mallet call for you?’

  The question put the girl to the blush, and she shook her head. ‘No, he never,’ she whispered. ‘I was to tell you if he ever did, you said, and had he done, I would’ve.’

  ‘Yes, I did say that, and do not forget it for one moment.’

  ‘It makes little difference, Mrs Rivers; Hog roams the house freely and finds you wherever you might be . . . the more bent over the better as far as he is concerned.’

  I watched as Patrick let out a noisy breath and caught his lip tightly between his teeth. ‘I do not like to talk about Hog while I am attempting to eat my food,’ he declared. ‘I have said as much before.’

  ‘Pat is right,’ Gideon said, ‘it is a most vile confluence of thought and deed.’

  ‘Well stop your ears, then,’ Rose told them.

  ‘So why were you up there, Rose?’ Mrs Rivers insisted.

  ‘Oh, I never was. I was in the main hall collecting the broken plates and glasses that got thrown all about last night by those fancy lady visitors, and I looked upwards and saw a figure in a dark shroud standing in the passageway up there.’

  To my surprise there were still a few of the staff who had not known about Lady Mallet’s creature for they looked up sharply and began to talk across each other in their eagerness to know more, but those who did have knowledge of it cast down their eyes and began to fidget with bonnet or apron or hair.

  Mrs Rivers raised her hand and had them all quiet. ‘Did it look upon you, Rose?’

  ‘No. Its back was half-turned, and as soon as I saw it I quitted the hall as quickly as I was able. I fairly bolted, although, to say truth, I do not believe in ghosts in the slightest degree.’